Suspended Sound We might have known it always: music is the landscape we move through in our dream                                     ~ from “An die Musik” by David Malouf  Could music be the least material of the arts? Granted, a physical body is required to produce it – vocal chords vibrate, air is thrust through a tunnel of cartilage and sinew, minute vibrations of highly trained muscles produce waves of air that carry tone and pitch to enchant or repel. Bone, flesh and nerve endings combine with athletic coordination to pluck tap, pound, tinkle, stroke and caress. And, in response, tiny hairs in ear cavities bristle, ribs vibrate, the heart pounds. But then, if we are in good musical hands, and are receptive, our experience of listening can take us to the boundaries of the sensory world where we begin to catch intimations of the supersensible.                          Eve Duncan is an Australian musician whose works carry these potentialities. She is a composer who works with the technical training of a European musical tradition but takes the virtuosity developed through this education into a contemporary sensibility interwoven with a hovering intimation of the future (she is also – I must admit to my bias – my friend).                           Eve has been writing and performing music since she was very young. She recalls that, at the age of 7, she produced music for a performance of Cinderella at her sister’s fourth birthday party. Although her family was not particularly musical, creativity was encouraged, and Eve wrote poetry, put on plays, was a soloist in her school’s choir and was encouraged by her school music teacher, Ros McMillan. (The school was Fintona, whose syllabus was set in place by the only Australian educationalist to have met Rudolf Steiner).                         In her teen years Eve learnt guitar from Jochen Schubert, practising up to 5 hours daily. It was Jochen who introduced her to contemporary classical music, firing a strong musical curiosity that plunged into Stockhausen and Stravinsky as avidly as Hendrix and Dylan. She wrote songs and performed into her early 20’s, but with a young family to care for, decided to pursue composition rather than performance and graduated from La Trobe University with Honours in Composition. (She also has a Masters Degree from the University of Melbourne). In her first year out of university she received 3rd prize in competition in Vienna, and this began a trend which has seen Eve gain more recognition and performances in the international music scene than here in Australia. She found that the La Trobe course gave her an excellent technical background and an outward-looking connection with international music movements that has stood her in good stead wherever she has gone.                            Eve began studying spiritual science when only 19. This, she feels, helped her to make sense of the kind of threshold experiences she had in her twenties and to see those in terms of the basis of an underlying spiritual world. Throughout her eight years of studying music, her over-arching question was “how does what I’m learning relate to the spiritual world?” By the end of her studies the question had twisted to “how can I share a spiritual view of the world through music?” She saw that in a world already full of music the unique thing she could offer was that of a composer dedicated to working with this question.                            When, in Vienna in 1993, the violin piece “Thrones” won the award, she felt it was the first real acceptance of her starting point. Eve has been trained to consider structure, tonal centres, the use of scale forms, rhythm, texture and timbre architecturally. The music’s content has been to do with universal anthroposophical themes (with titles such as “Spiritus Solaris”, “Kyriotetes”, “Cherubim” and “Buddha on Mars”). More recently she has been exploring the mysteries and the nature and spirit of Australia. Her last performance was of a cello duet performed by Alister Barker (a former Melbourne Rudolf Steiner School student) and Chien-Hsui Wung at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, which focussed on the elemental beings of earth, air, fire and water, as well as Tim Flannery’s description of the formation of Australian geography.                           In 2001, during Melbourne’s Federation Music Week, “Tiger Snake” and “Runner of Light” (commissioned for the Centenary of Federation) were performed – pieces that explore Aboriginal Dreamtime spirituality alongside the brutality and violence suffered by Australian Aborigines. Amos Roach played didjeridu alongside flute, trombone, cello, percussion, double bass, string orchestra and soprano vocals. Eve says she tries to use didjeridu only when invited to by Aboriginal performers (“Tiger Snake” used a poem by Aboriginal poet Lisa Bellear as a starting point) so as not to exploit the instrument’s traditional usage. But she sees it as an instrument of the future whose tonal quality is capable of drawing European instruments into a new kind of vitality. According to Eve, its tonality accords with the single pitch that Steiner sees as a stage in the musical experience of the future.                         Her meditations on Australian nature and soil formations lead to completely different rhythmic and melodic expression to those offered by the European experience. “Australia has one of the oldest geographies. Rocks lying in the Macdonnell Ranges haven’t moved in 60,000 years, in contrast with New Zealand, which is more recently formed and still experiencing glacial activity. One experiences this glacial activity in the confident use of rhythm used by New Zealand composers in their striking music.” Since leaving the South Pole, Australia has been protected by New Guinea in the north, which has borne the brunt of geographical upheaval, evident by its soaring mountains. By contrast, Australia has experienced a relative lack of upheaval and more consistent temperatures. Eve finds that these realities transmit very readily to music. Another strong influence is Australia’s proximity to Lemurian spiritual centres.                    Over the years I have been to many performances of Eve’s music and have witnessed the social texture of her music making. She has travelled to countries as diverse as Korea, Romania, Israel and Japan, for performances. She has been an Executive Committee member of the Asian Composers’ League and is currently President of the Melbourne Composers’ League. She has been a jury member at competitions and has organised music festivals here in Melbourne. Her music has been performed by Michael Kieran Harvey, Barrie Webb, Peter Neville, Chia Hong Liao, members of the Tokyo Sinfonietta, Danae Killian, Tim Veldman, Tom E. Lewis, Rupert Guenther, just to name a few. Many of these musicians commissioned the work they performed and many have become her friends. I have been struck by her ability to attract a wide variety of people to an event, and somehow to make it work, to integrate their differences and celebrate their contributions. She sees her work as a karmic activity; she likes to compose for specific musicians and to bring aspects of their individual spiritual being into the direction the music takes.                      She loves the elusive and transitory aspect of musical performance. A piece is never performed the same way twice. It exists as a potential for present and future performances. The music is about creative will. She feels that a change has occurred in music over the last 20 years that is still in the process of evolving. The collaboration between composers, musicians, producers, concert curators is becoming more valuable than the music product. “I think this is a general change in the world, that we can’t operate so well in isolation and are being forced into group activity that perhaps will become the spiritual communities of the future. For instance, I’m finding that a work I may have composed two years ago … doesn’t leave me free to develop the next step until it has been through the process of being worked on by musicians, concert producers and audiences.”                               Which leads to the role of the listener. The listener is invited to participate. There are rhythmic convergences, melodic complexities, dense patterns and silences. Eve’s music is alive with the chaos, the dynamism, and the beauty of the universe. She creates an architecture of memory, of longing, and of intimations of the future. Her music doesn’t rest on what is but actively engages with what is coming. The form hangs quivering in the air, to be inhabited by the listener.                               The November 2004 edition of “Ariel” included some lines of mine that I wrote in an attempt to find some sort of verbal expression of a quality I find in Eve’s music – that of enunciating the alchemical space where matter reveals the spirit at its heart. To confirm the spherical nature of human experience, Eve took these words from the fourth section of that poem:            Summer’s life ends and the blood coloured poppy, the sun behind it, burning it to transcendence, is a substance close to flame  and produced a short work for harp (recorded by Marshal McGuire). In discussing this piece she said, “In a sense the music is suspended sound that does not seek to travel, but rests and glows”. I think this is a good description of her work. She explores concepts, for example of harmony in the piece “Cherubim”, but allows apparent disharmony to rest, without seeking to resolve it, encouraging the listener to make the imaginative leap into the subtle space this creates. David Malouf is another poet whose words Eve has worked with (in “The Crab Feast” for example). Perhaps he can have the last word:              What else does it make, …, if not a space we might re-enter in innocence, pure steps of sound…                                              (An die Musik)   ~ Esther Theiler