Gordon Kerry: Introduction to Robert Dahm’s Piano Trio

Robert Dahm

Gordon Kerry

Gordon Kerry’s orchestral music has been commissioned by the ABC, BBC, Symphony Australia, Ars Musica Australis and the Australian Youth Orchestra. Most recently he has made a new completion of the Mozart Requiem commissioned by ABC Classic FM and an overture celebrating the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Centenary. His extensive body of chamber music has been commissioned for or premiered by Musica Viva Australia, Wigmore Hall, London as well as independent ensembles in Australia, Germany, the USA, Sweden and Russia. Recordings of his music appear on Tall Poppies, Vox Australis and ABC Classics, who recently released Harvesting the solstice thunders, a CD of his orchestral music played by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

A commitment to his local community has produced new works for Opera in the Alps, the Murray Conservatorium Choirs and Orchestra and the Riverina Summer School for Strings. He has written numerous choral works for ensembles including Sydney Philharmonia, the Prague Chamber Choir and the Royal Melbourne Philharmonic. His opera Medea has been performed in Australia and the USA with Chamber Made Opera and in Germany in several seasons with the Berliner Kammeroper. The most recent of several awards was the 2004 APRA – Australian Music Centre’s Orchestral Work of the Year for This Insubstantial Pageant performed by the WASO.

Gordon Kerry studied composition with Barry Conyngham at the University of Melbourne, and he has held fellowships from the Australia Council, Peggy Glanville-Hicks Trust and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, USA. He lives on a hill in north-eastern Victoria, Australia.

Introduction to Robert Dahm’s Piano Trio

Open a score by Australian composer Robert Dahm (born 1981) and you may be surprised to find that it’s hand-written. Most of us who still use notation these days have some kind of music processing software, resisting – or not – the seductions of the cut-and-paste function and the ability to have an ensemble of Daleks play the music back at the touch of a button. Dahm’s calligraphy is beautiful, but, more importantly, it demonstrates the amazing degree of care he lavishes on every detail. His musical language is of a highly refined, late-modernist variety: metrical structures are frequently highly complex, blurring any sense of a regular pulse; instrumental and vocal techniques are extended to create extraordinary expressive effects. But nothing is extraneous, and the calligraphic elegance is reflected in the clarity of Dahm’s aural imagination and design.

He is able to create striking effects with minimal means: in I watched you as you disappeared, Orpheus’ tragic loss if Euridice at the brink of Hades is depicted by a solo bass clarinet moving from frenetic angularity, with ‘barked’ syllables from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus integrated into the line, to an exhausted, neutral pulse. In Dahm’s setting of lines from Hölderlin’s Mnemosyne, the singer must move, often mid-word, between conventional vocal production and Sprechstimme, much closer to spoken sound. This creates polyphony within the vocal line which is enhanced by the tracery of piano accompaniment.

Dahm, who has emerged as a brilliant and distinct new voice since 2005, naturally admires such contemporaries as Richard Barrett, James Dillon and Liza Lim, and has noted with approval Arvo Pärt’s ability to create music out of silence. But he describes a breakthrough moment with his discovery the music of Guillaume de Machaut, the greatest composer of the 14th century, who, reflecting a belief in divine design, used mathematical ratios between superimposed lines of music to create unprecedentedly sophisticated textures above a slow-moving, repeated plainchant melody.

Several of these musical concerns are immediately obvious in Dahm’s short Piano Trio of 2008. Big chords, ricocheting between the piano’s bass and treble, mask the ghostly appearance of the violin and cello (at the start both of these instruments are muted, playing as softly as possible, with light bow-pressure above the fingerboard to reduce the richness of overtones normally produced – the first of numerous instances of the subtle use of timbre). At one point, as in Machaut’s work, one line (here the cello) moves at a much slower rate than the other two instruments’; elsewhere the strings are treated as a texture to balance the piano. And the work’s climax – a loud, one beat texture of several superimposed metrical divisions gives way, breathtakingly, to a sudden and profound silence.

This performance is by the Freshwater Trio, an ensemble based in Melbourne, Australia (www.freshwatertrio.com) and is used by generous

Music

Play Piano Trio (5.7 MB)