The composer - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 26: Stories for Today
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Patrick Holland
When I picked up the disc and saw the cover photograph of the dark-haired young man reading a score in the pews of St Stephen's Cathedral, I recognised him at once. I had known him - or known of him - as a first-year student at the Griffith Conservatorium. I dropped out before beginning second year, but I remembered that Milorad Jaarvi, then a postgraduate, was the conservatorium's star. Only the best young musicians were asked to perform one of his pieces at the biannual concert.
The recording bore the ABC Classical imprint. On the back I read the release date: 1999.
‘Ten years ago. Are there any others?'
‘No.'
I wondered out loud: Could it be so difficult for a composer with the start he had had to make a career?
‘After the death of my family I had no energy left for vanity,' said the composer. ‘I could not push myself, as they say. Nowadays, I rarely send music away.'
‘Why do you write if you don't mean your work to be heard?'
‘Because I'm a composer. There is nothing else I know to do with the time life gives me. Though I try very hard to be a farmer instead.'
The composer finished his cigarette and took a folder of manuscript scores from his drawer. He showed me a suite of piano pieces that were built around quotations from Palestrina's Lamentations of Jeremiah. The notes were sparely written, the light, spontaneous pen strokes and dabs of ink like flecks of birds against a winter sky.
I asked him to play one of the pieces. He flattened the score against his leg and sat down at the old upright.
He had excerpted a modal phrase from Lamentation No.1 that stepped sorrowfully down from its root to arrive at a minor chord, and this he played at varying intervals, in varying rhythms above an accompaniment that at times accepted it, at others resisted, alternating light and dark, home and exile, so the sadness of the motif became exquisite.
‘You must publish this!' I said, taking up the rest of the manuscript. ‘All of these. They must be performed.'
He smiled and went to his shelf and took up another score, a massive document. At the top of the first page was the title: Missa Susanne et Michelle, for soprano, alto, tenor and bass.
‘It's my requiem mass, the one I wrote for my little family.'
I thought the pages seemed to have been handled recently. There was no dust. I touched a quaver on the last page, and the ink remained on my skin.
‘You're still writing it. But you said you have no faith.'
The composer sighed.
‘I write now, ironically, in my hours of doubt. Those hours pass, of course, just as hours of faithlessness pass by the saints. But there is one thing that troubles me. If the world is our cradle; if poetry and song are accidental offshoots of the desire of apes to call to each other across distances; if love is a sentimental perversion of the desire to perpetuate the species; if life itself can be created chemically by men in laboratories, as we are told will soon be possible; if everything human is so completely of this world, then why are we never at home here? Why do we long for somewhere else? A place our world only resembles. From this longing comes the music.'
‘Is it finished?' I asked.
‘It's always been finished. I just keep praying it.' He smiled. ‘I erase three notes in the morning only to put them back at night.'
He put a compact disc on top of the manuscript, marked with black felt pen. The text said Kyrie/Agnus Dei.
‘The disc contains the first and last movements. I mustered singers from about the district and recorded them in St Finnain's, on Windy Knoll. It's a crude recording, but you can take it if you want. I have copies.'
‘Come with me,' I said. ‘We'll find a copier for the score. It's just possible I can get this performed.'
‘Take the manuscript.'
‘What if I lose it? It could be a masterpiece.'
The composer smiled, almost laughed, as if he had not heard the word in many years. I realised that the music before me had nothing to do with ambition.
The sunlight had vanished into the hills and a wind rose in the east over the ocean, blowing the curtains and making the composer's room cold.
I finished my tea and took up the violin, as well as the score and recording. ‘I should go,' I said. ‘My family will be waiting.'
‘Of course.'
I took my car down the gravel road and onto the asphalt. I slipped the disc into the player and heard the voices of four amateur singers carrying a mass inside a tiny wooden church. After a few moments of listening, the wind in the microphone, the shuffling of feet and the creaking of floorboards seemed to vanish. The mass left the building and floated in the darkening foothills of the range. I recognised the notes of the film score Jaarvi had mentioned, but the phrasing and then the deep structure I began to perceive changed the notes utterly, till the film score faded into oblivion and I knew that if I ever heard it again it would only seem to me a faint, fragmented echo of a voice that had spoken to me clearly this night. The road swung out onto a ledge that revealed the last flush of blue dusk over the ocean. I pulled the car off to the side and listened to the Agnus Dei, to all the beautiful anguish the composer had poured into the God-shaped hole that resided in his heart. We will all lose everything, I thought. And perhaps then we may earn it back. A sustained soprano note seemed to reach across the water toward the infinite horizon. ♦