Lisa Gerrard’s Chamber Music: Tribal World-Music, Wordless Ambient Hymns

W   hat the music I love expresses to me is not thought too indefinite to put into words but, on the contrary, too definite.”
  —  Felix Mendelssohn, letter to Marc-André Souchay, 15-OCT-1842.

W   hen you make strange music like we do, there aren’t many people with whom you can talk about it. When [Lisa Gerrard] says, ‘Music is sacred,’ try to explain that to a ‘normal’ human being.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Lisa Gerrard, born in Melbourne in 1961, is a musician, singer and composer who was a co-founder of the group ‘Dead Can Dance’ with former music partner Brendan Perry. Gerrard’s versatile vocal range (contralto to mezzo-soprano) and song-writing are what she’s best known for, but she also provides instrumentals on many of her recordings, most frequently playing yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer). Since the break-up of ‘Dead Can Dance’ she has been doing solo work plus selective collaboration—for most of the past ten years. Gerrard received a Golden Globe award and an Academy Award nomination for the score for the 2000 film ‘Gladiator’, her collaboration with Hans Zimmer. Her soundtrack for the 2003 film ‘Whalerider’ was also widely acclaimed.

The release (about 2 months ago) of her wonderful new CD ‘FarScape’—ethereal original space-music chamber compositions, accompanied by German keyboardist Klaus Schulze—led me to recently revisit her work.


But, in fact, it was a series of emails yesterday in response to the previous two CMT blog posts about watery, atmospheric character pieces—Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 and Saint-Saëns’s, Carnival of the Animals VII, ‘Aquarium’—that caused me to key up Gerrard’s cover of the larghetto aria in Handel’s opera ‘Serse’, from Gerrard’s 1995 CD ‘The Mirror Pool’.


    [50-sec clip, Lisa Gerrard and John Bonnar, George Friderick Handel, Serse (Xerxes) HWV 40 [1738], ‘Larghetto’ aria [‘Largo’], 1.2MB MP3]

L isa has an incredible voice. She can go down so low! When I ask her ‘Where do you get this from?’ she tells me about [Tuvan throat singers]. She can sing two voices at the same time using her belly and the overtones using chest voice.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Chamber works on that recording were arranged by John Bonnar and performed by members of the Victorian Philharmonic Orchestra in Melbourne.

Having now immersed myself in that disc, how could I not notice/remember ‘Sanvean’!


    [50-sec clip, Lisa Gerrard and members of Victoria Phil, Andrew Claxton, ‘Sanvean’, 1.2MB MP3]


Sanvean’, composed in 1993 by Andrew Claxton, has been used on many film soundtracks, and between 1998 and 2003 served as theme music for the U.K. NHS MMR immunization campaign. Over the past 15 years it is increasingly frequently used for weddings, funerals and other ceremonies. Soprano Sarah Brightman recorded ‘Sanvean’ with the London Symphony Orchestra early in 2008. Have a listen to a clip from that…


    [50-sec clip, Sarah Brightman and members of LSO, Andrew Claxton, ‘Sanvean’, 1.2MB MP3]

The main point of my posting this today is to share with you my delight at ‘re-discovering’ how much I had enjoyed Lisa and her DCD and earlier solo work—in the belief that you, too, may like being reminded of Lisa Gerrard and enjoy revisiting these things as well.

But secondary reasons for posting are:

1. to draw your attention to the new 2-disc recording of Lisa with Klaus Schulze;
   
2. to provide a link (below) to Andrew Claxton and point to Brightman and others who are doing ‘covers’ of his classical vocal writing;
   
3. to suggest that these miniatures might be intriguing to insert into your own ensemble’s programs, or to use as encore material;
   
4. to initiate a thread on extended/exotic singing technique (including overtone-singing, wordless singing, countertenor, etc.);
   
5. to remind us that authenticity is what really matters, and that the Truly Authentic is sometimes Exotic/Esoteric/Extreme; and
   
6. to continue the previous CMT thread on ‘atmospheric’ chamber music, in response to those of you who emailed me about this topic.

A common piece of advice given to performers has tended to be along the lines of ‘make the piece your own.’ This is similar to the notion of Eigentlichkeit in Heidegger. To be eigentlich for Heidegger is not simply to be authentic but to ‘be yourself’. In one sense, both of these bits of advice (‘make it your own’ and ‘be yourself’) are perfectly sensible and even desirable. But one of the difficulties that performers have in approaching a piece of music that is unfamiliar is that it is difficult to ‘feel at home’ with the piece... When Heidegger says that ‘understanding is either authentic, arising out of one’s own Self as such, or inauthentic,’ it is hard to distinguish this sense of authenticity from Kant’s account of autonomy. In both cases, the Self is not merely supposed to be the principal but the sole determining factor.”
  —  Bruce Benson, Improvisation of Musical Dialogue, p. 165.

The beauty and expressiveness of Lisa Gerrard’s voice—particularly with the wordless, ambient, hymn-like pieces—are unique in the corpus of vocal chamber music. Regarding #5 above, the wordlessness defamiliarizes us and, consequently, our ordinary linguistic habits for understanding vocal music are put on holiday. The timbral changes associated with wordfulness are all there, the gestural semantic representations are there, but not the veneer of words. We perceive the meaning, but with only pre-verbal, timbral, and gestural syntax elements! We are treated to different sources of interpretation—the ordinary surface of word-processes stripped away, the once-subliminal becomes the new liminal.

Those of us who use Finale® or other programs for our composing have of course the routine experience of the sampled-waveform libraries of ‘ahhs’ and other vowels, for the instant playback of the pieces we work on. So the textures of wordless voices that regular people so seldom hear—we hear synthetic incarnations of these every day, and they ‘grow’ on us.

L isa had only two conditions: huge reverb spaces and no headphones. Now, I’m a lover of reverb, but this was almost a bit too much even for me.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

However, to hear live performances and recordings like Lisa’s: this is distinctly unusual. And highly authentic! Not many chamber music presenters organize programs of ‘wordless’ vocal material; not many chamber ensembles with singers offer ‘wordless’ repertoire. But there is no reason why that situation should not change. For its novelty and exoticness, it’s plausible that there would be an eager market for this...

W   e had recorded about five hours of music straight without any breaks… Lisa sang everything only once. There were only maybe two minutes that could not be used. She only said, ‘Well, at 10:22 on that one track you must cut about 30 seconds, as the intonation there was not precise.’ When Lisa works, she is completely captured in her own world.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

Tell you what: I will begin to assemble a list of wordless vocal music and put it up on CMT... Shostakovich’s ‘Songs on Verses by Dolmatovsky’ (for voice, wordless chorus & piano) Op. 86 comes to mind. Not instrumental ‘Lieder ohne Worte’ (Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, [Opp. 19,30,38,53,62,67,85,102; 1830-1845]) but vocal music that is wordless. Charles Alkan, Anton Rubinstein, Ignaz Moscheles, Edvard Grieg? John Gibson’s ‘Judith and Holofernes’? Chaya Czernowin’s ‘Pnima... ins Innere’? Wolfgang Rihm’s ‘Donaueschinger Musiktage 2006 Etudes’? Other ‘New Music’ vocal compositions that are wordless lieder? Please feel free to email me or add a comment below if there are some wordless vocal chamber music pieces that you especially admire.

And we will then have more words on ‘wordless’ repertoire.

Thank you, Lisa and Klaus, for this nice new ‘FarScape’ and for your earlier atmospherics and spontaneity, which continue to please and inspire after all this time.

S pontaneity matters a lot. Many people think good music has to do with sweat and hard work, which must be continual and last for months. My opinion, however, is that if this is the case the music is [sure to be] bad.”
  —  Klaus Schulze, Farscape.

• Lisa Gerrard website
  
• Lisa Gerrard page at 4AD Records
  
• Maisey J. An enchanting evening with DeadCanDance’s Lisa Gerrard. VEER, AUG/SEP-1995.
  
• Klaus Schulze website
  
• Andrew Claxton, Director, Oxford School of Music
  
• Sarah Brightman website
  
• Handel’s Serse at Wikipedia
  
• Bruce Ellis Benson page at Wheaton College
  
• Overtone Singing page at Wikipedia
  
• Gerrard L, Schulze K. FarScape. (4AD, 2008.)
  
• Gerrard L. The Mirror Pool. (4AD, 1995.)
  
• Brightman S & LSO. Symphony. (Manhattan, 2008.)
  
• Benson B. The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Cambridge Unv, 2003.
  
• Kivy P. Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance. Cornell Univ, 1998.