“an assured, gripping performance that speaks to Sheldon’s mastery of atmosphere and her vocal precision…” - Limelight Magazine
“riveting” - New York Times
“stirring… like a pathway from the inanimate to the divine…” - Sydney Morning Herald
poem for a dried up river (2019) is a collaboration with artist and scenographer Elizabeth Gadsby. It was awarded Work of the Year: Dramatic at the 2022 Australian Art Music Awards.
Composer: Jane Sheldon —— Text: Alice Oswald —— Designer: Elizabeth Gadsby —— Choreographic consultant: Danielle Micich —— Lighting Design: Alexander Berlage —— Sound design: Benjamin Carey
Instrumentation: two sopranos, Trombones (doubling Conch Shell), Violin, Viola, Cello, Percussion, Electronics
The work has been presented at Sydney Festival by Sydney Chamber Opera, and at New York’s Resonant Bodies Festival.
Australian Premiere: conducted by Jack Symonds —— Sopranos: Jane Sheldon, Anna Fraser —— Trombones/Conch Shell: Matthew Harrison —— Violin: Véronique Serret —— Viola: James Wannan —— Cello: Jack Ward —— Percussion: Claire Edwardes, Bree van Reyk
US Premiere: conducted by Jeffrey Gavett —— Sopranos: Jane Sheldon, Sarah Brailey —— Trombones/Conch Shell: William Lang —— Violin: Adrienne Munden-Dixon —— Viola: Hannah Levinson —— Cello: Julia Henderson —— Percussion: Caitlin Cawley, Jessica Tsang
British poet Alice Oswald wrote the breathless and exquisitely sonic Dunt: a poem for a dried up river after seeing a Roman figurine of a water nymph in a museum. Oswald says of the water nymph figurine: "I admire these extreme ways of invoking rain, just as I admire anyone who dares, by means of metaphor (and all language is rooted in metaphor), to communicate with something that isn’t human. If you’ve paid money for seeds or animals and you want to increase their worth by growing them on, then a water nymph is not some kind of a literary personification of water, nor is it a liquefaction of women, but it’s an effort, driven by absolute need, to make contact with something inscrutable." This piece considers the effort Oswald refers to, and explores the strange puzzle presented when a human culture requires that a small, inanimate figurine of a female form somehow manifests water.
The text is set with the kind permission of the poet.
There is a clear division of labor in the distribution of the vocal material: one soprano sings the poem, the other sings almost entirely wordless vocal materials, many of which derive from sounds that are the natural consequences of physical effort; this latter voice functions to express the work of the water nymph, who occupies liminal spaces between animal and goddess, natural and supernatural, real and unreal. The sounds from the water nymph start with an activation of the breath, the first place effort reveals itself in the body. These breath sounds are then mimicked in the instruments of the ensemble as the nymph's voice extends into phonation.
The piece's structure and and palette of timbres are intended to suggest other kinds of liminality or a confusion between contrasting states: dry and wet, weak and strong, barren and fecund.
The performance is an installation work that will respond to a range of sites. The arc of the performance is a linear journey undertaken by a female form in an act of physical effort. It calls for an almost achievable task to be undertaken, mirroring the task of the water nymph as she attempts to call forth water from a bed of limestone. As such the staging requires that Jane undertake the task of unrolling a 200kg path of stoneware clay. As the performer struggles against the mass of clay what is left behind her as it unrolls is a path— a dry riverbed— its surface marked by her exertion. The physical language of the staging is characterised by manipulation of pace within an act of physical force.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.
spectre: three attempts to summon her
This piece was composed in 2023 for Lamorna Nightingale and is dedicated to Kaija Saariaho, in memoriam.
The title may bring to mind Saariaho’s association with the French Spectralists, but it is really a reference to an imagined apparition. This piece is intended as a gentle ritual, undertaken to lovingly conjure Saariaho’s ghost (whatever that might mean).
A theme that recurs throughout Saariaho’s oeuvre is the way that memory and longing are full of distortion and fragmentation. In filling my own piece with distorted and bleached out fragments of Saariaho’s language, I am, likewise, trying to capture my memory of her.
The most present object from Saariaho’s music is a multiphonic from Noanoa, recorded for me by Lamorna. In the first attempt to summon Saariaho, that multiphonic is transformed and distorted and the live flute part is largely intended to gently refract and colour the harmonic terrain implied by the multiphonic, while doing not very much at all. In the second attempt, Lamorna whispers a recitation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Il pleut, which was set by Saariaho in 1986. This poem is itself about memory and women’s voices. In the third attempt, Noanoa’s multiphonic is repeated like a refrain or a mantra of some kind, with the thought that repetition might render it a lure; her ghost might recognize something essentially hers tolling in the music, and be beckoned by it.
I’d never thought much about ghosts before.
______________
It’s raining women’s voices as if they had died even in memory
it’s raining you, too, marvellous encounters of my life o little drops
and those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular cities
listen as it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
listen to the bonds fall which hold you above and below
by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by the composer
Spectre: three attempts to summon her was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring with the generous support of Kim Williams AM.
colloque
Composed for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, conducted by Roger Benedict.
This piece, composed in 2023, is a setting of fragments from Conversations with My Soul, a long poem by Etel Adnan, in which the speaker seems to be addressing a lover, a natural force (specifically, fog), and the self, all conflated into one entity at once familiar, faintly intimidating, and in need of comfort; and all able to be interpreted as something divine. Her poem opens with the line, “come along my fog.” In Colloque, the vocal line is intended to be incantatory while being relatively static, an invocation always held within the gently mobile fog provided by the ensemble. This fog is built both timbrally and microtonally.
Instrumentation: Soprano, Flute, Clarinet, Trumpet, Trombone, Violin, Viola, Cello, Double bass