Kelly Ground (1966) 20’

Kelly Ground is one of Lumsdaine’s earliest acknowledged pieces, composed when he was in his mid-30s. Written for solo piano, its title refers to one of Australia’s most famous historical figures, Ned Kelly, a bushranger whose defiance towards the colonial authorities eventually resulted in his dramatic capture and execution. The composition is the result of several projects that did not eventuate; as early as the 1950s Lumsdaine had collaborated with Peter Porter to compose an opera about Kelly. Michael Hall recounts that this work was abandoned because Lumsdaine and Porter were ‘unable to see Kelly as a living person on stage’. During this period, opera as a form was not entirely out of fashion, with performances of new works composed by Tippett, Vaughan Williams and Walton. Yet the radical inventiveness of Nono, Xenakis, Boulez and Stockhausen was not in any way directed towards opera, rendering theatrical forms particularly problematic. On the other hand, works for solo piano remained utterly acceptable. Indeed, many of the most influential works from the period were for this instrument. One of Kelly Ground’s most extraordinary features is the deftness with which it shapes the connection of traditions it engages.

Although the published score makes reference to Kelly only in the title, there is a programme which relates each of the strophes which comprise Kelly Ground’s two cycles, to different aspects of Kelly’s day of execution. These are: ‘Kelly’s return to Consciousness on the morning of his Execution’, ‘His View along the Ground to the foothills of the Wombat Ranges’, ‘A Nocturne on the Plain’, ‘A Clamorous Aubade’, ‘An Aria for Kelly, focussing simultaneously on Inside and Outside the Cell’, and ‘The Hanging’. The serial structures which move row by row are, like the bars of Kelly’s cell, rigorously enforced, structuring the way the (musical and metaphorical) ground is perceived. When the serial procedures cease to be followed for the final part of the first cycle, the result is not freedom, but liminality which is the failure of social cohesion represented by Kelly’s death in particular, and capital punishment in general. Following Kelly’s death, the perspective is shifted radically. Although the underlying musical material is essentially the same, and it remains no less bounded by social conventions (even if they are different), it is used in a completely different manner.

Schoenberg once commented that he sought ‘a sense of form and logic acquired from tradition’. Boulez disagreed, preferring forms which resulted from the structures latent in his serial procedures. By the late 1960s, Boulez’s serialism was an established practice, used by composers across Europe and beyond. For David Lumsdaine, Boulez’s serialism was one of the traditions with which composers were engaged. Lumsdaine’s 1966 work Kelly Ground references Boulez’s conceptions about structure, as the stuff of history. That is not to say that Lumsdaine’s musical cosmology was limited to Boulez, for Stockhausen plays an equally important role. Webern, too, is there, standing as a luminous constellation in the middle of the piece. Stravinsky and Messiaen must also be mentioned, for their presence is audible throughout the composition.

The nearness of these composers in Lumsdaine’s music represents his close engagement with the traditions of European composition in the twentieth century. The immediacy of the incorporation of these external voices into Lumsdaine’s compositions is complemented by the scrutiny to which their music is subjected. Although his pieces exhibit strong relationships with those by other composers, the distinctiveness of Lumsdaine’s own soundworld is in no way reduced.

As an abstract composition, Kelly Ground can be divided into two cycles the first of which comprises five strophes. The two cycles are radically different: the writing in the first is dense, lively, and virtuosic; the second is still and contemplative. The composition is formed from the pitch material of cyclic matrices (confirming the allusion in the title to the cyclic bass on which a melody is composed), which in the first cycle is employed linearly, row by row. The chords of the second cycle, on the other hand, are formed from the columns of the same matrix. The pivot which allows the change of serial construction is audible towards the end of the first cycle, when the structures break down and the texture is fragmented into repeated chords over which rapid birdsong‑like cells are played. Whereas the first cycle requires the kind of listening advocated by Boulez at the time – that is, ‘instantaneous’ and not teleological – the second cycle suggests a way of listening more akin to Stockhausen, who writes that: ‘Forms in which the concentration on the now – on each now – makes, as it were, vertical slices which cut across horizontal time experience into the timelessness I call eternity.’

By drawing critically on different musical traditions, Lumsdaine is able to create a space within which the social conventions that surround both music, and the legend of Kelly, can be contemplated.

© 2006 Michael Hooper