MODART

Joanna Selleck

Johanna Selleck's Boult to Marina responded impressively to the feel of its text, coming up with a varied and interesting aural fabric which developed impressively.

Program Notes: Boult to Marina Johanna Selleck

Ern Malley and his collected poems, The Darkening Ecliptic, have become part of Australian legend. The story begins with Max Harris, a young and rebellious student at the University of Adelaide. In 1940, Harris launched the Angry Penguins magazine – a radical, modernist and provocative platform for poets, writers and artists. Among the first to take exception to the anarchistic sentiments expressed in the Angry Penguins were Haris’s fellow students at Adelaide University, who arranged for him to be unceremoniously dunked in the river Torrens. However, the magazine’s supporters were as determined as its detractors. The first issue and the controversy that surrounded it captured the attention of the Melbourne lawyer and patron of the arts, John Reed, who invited Harris to continue work on his publication as part of the artistic community centred at Heide – Reed’s farmhouse located in the idyllic bushland of outer Melbourne. The Heide movement became synonymous with the work of artists such as Sydney Nolan and Albert Tucker, both of whom were contributors to the Angry Penguins. Harris moved to Melbourne in 1943, and thereafter (until 1946 when it ceased publication), Angry Penguins was published conjointly with John Reed. Harris recounts the “widespread melding” and “cross-fertilisation” that took place at Heide. This included not only the leading Australian poets, writers and artists of the day, but musicians such as the composer Dorian Le Gallienne and jazz musicians Graham and Roger Bell, and Lazy Ade. Harris proudly notes that Artur Schnabel was an honorary Angry Penguin when in Australia.

In late 1943, in order to discredit Harris, the Angry Penguins, and the modernist movement generally; two traditionalist poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, concocted a brilliant hoax. They created the fictitious characters of Ernest Lalor Malley and his sister Ethel. Ern, they decided, had suffered a premature death from Grave’s disease at the age of 25. Amongst his possessions, Ethel had discovered a series of poems entitled The Darkening Ecliptic, and claiming to have no knowledge of poetry herself, she sent them to Max Harris requesting his expert opinion. Harris concluded that the poems were a work of genius: “one of the most outstanding poets that we have produced here”. The complete 16 poems were published in 1944 in the Autumn edition of the Angry Penguins.

The hoax was revealed soon after. McAuley and Stewart claimed that the poems were a single afternoon’s work – a collaboration which took placed when they were confined to Melbourne’s Victoria Barracks as conscripts to the army intelligence section. They had armed themselves with a book of Shakespeare quotations, various military pamphlets on swamp drainage and mosquito infections, as well as uncompleted fragments of their own poetry. Via a spontaneous and partly random process, using techniques of free association, McAuley and Stewart gave birth to The Darkening Ecliptic. Their creation was, they believed, an accurate imitation of modernist poetry, and highlighted what they saw as the modernist movement’s inherent pretentiousness and absurdity. Their objections were aimed not only at Harris’s own work, but at poets such as Dylan Thomas and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whom Harris had published. McAuley and Stewart were supported by the conservatives of the literary world, most notably by A.D. Hope, who had reportedly exhorted the two hoaxers to “Get Maxy”.

When the hoax was revealed, the consequences were severe. A court case ensued, in which Harris was accused of publishing obscene material. The proceedings were farcical, and personally damaging for Harris. Yet, despite their origins, Harris continued to believe passionately in The Darkening Ecliptic. Although the debate concerning the literary merit of the poems continues today, there can be no question that they continue to fire the collective imaginings of Australians across many fields of endeavor. Books, academic papers and theses, and a radio documentary have been written on the topic. A painting of Ern Malley by Sidney Nolan in1973 helped to immortalize the character, and the artist Gary Shead returned to the subject in 2001 with his painting ‘The Apotheosis of Ern Malley”. Dave Dallowitz, an early Angry Penguins contributor, composed and recorded a Jazz suite inspired by Ern Malley. The Melbourne Composer, Peter Tahourdin, set the complete poems for narrators, tape, soprano, baritone and chamber ensemble in 1970 as a commission from the Art Gallery of South Australia, following Sidney Nolan's gift to the gallery of his Ern Malley paintings and drawings. Tahourdin's piece received its first performance in 1988 at the Melbourne Arts' Centre. In 2003, Peter Carey wrote My Life as a Fake based on Ern Malley’s story. Currently, the Centre for Studies in Australian Music is preparing a volume of song settings of The Darkening Ecliptic by 24 contemporary Australian composers.

The manner in which the poetry came into existence raises important questions about the nature of the creative process. For many, the hoax poetry was of greater merit than McAuley and Stewarts’ own deliberately crafted and “legitimate” poetry. Max Harris argued that the assumed persona of Ern Malley had liberated the two poets from restrictive conventions. Albert Tucker described the hoax as freeing the perpetuators “from the obsessive obligation to traditional verse forms”. As a composer aiming to create a song setting of Boult to Marina, I have chosen to explore the process which gave rise to the poems and thereby test the arguments put forward by Harris and Tucker. With this aim, I spontaneously selected materials from my own library shelves and the university library. Some were purely random – works that I had taught or studied, and others which seemed by “free association” to relate to the themes in the poems. The evolution of the musical score became an improvisation around structural points which related to musical quotes from a diverse set of sources. The so-called “Tristan chord” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde is the basis of the opening harmony. Gradually interwoven with this are fragments from Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, the Loreley theme from Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony, Schubert’s Meeres Stille and Gluck’s Orfeo, with the aria Thousand Tortures interpolated into the text as well as the music. Thus, the process of composing the music paralleled, to some extent, the process of composing the poems. In this way, I hoped to discover if this process would lead me into new areas of creative thought, as many would argue it had done for McAuley and Stewart.

Boult to Marina is used with the kind permission of the publishers ETT Imprint.