"A certain So-and-so declares: 'I belong to no school, and nothing could be further from me than to have learnt anything from the dead.' That is to say (if I have understood him aright): l am a fool after my own fashion." -Goethe
As co-director of new music organisation The Firm, Raymond Chapman Smith has quietly presented over 130 concerts of new music. But his uncomplicated disinterest in recognition or recording means his music is rarely heard beyond the walls of Adelaide's Elder Hall, where The Firm's annual concert series is presented to a regular audience of 50-100 initiates. This is the first album of his work, played by US born Australian-Iranian pianist Amir Farid.
As a teenager in 1970 Chapman Smith began performing in AZ Music in Sydney with the recently returned Australian assistant to Cardew and Stockhausen, David Ahern, feeding new ideas into the local music scene, and fielding phoned-in performance instructions from La Monte Young for their improvisations at Brett Whiteley's gallery. After moving to Adelaide to study with Richard Meale, through the '80s and '90s Chapman Smith founded and co-helmed loosely Cageian composer-performer collectives. Since 1996 he has co-directed new music organisation The Firm, revelling in the poetic aesthetic of 19th Century German romanticism.
A set of 26 short pieces that cycle through all the major and minor tonalities, Nachschriften are a series of reflections and variations on themes - sometimes, variations on variations. For the most part they are simple dances - minuets, mazurkas, waltzes and ländler.
Some of my thoughts while making this music revolved around a passage from a speech which Paul Celan gave in 1958. Celan, of course, was speaking of lyric poetry but I would respectfully paraphrase his words as follows...
'Music is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time -through it, not above or beyond it. Music, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the - not always greatly hopeful - belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Music in this sense too is underway: it is a making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.'
June, 2001 - sitting on the Schubert Ring, taking 6am breakfast with my esteemed colleague, Herr Professor, Doktor Grant, I resolved to keep a musical journal of our weird and wonderful Viennese sojourn.
Initially the plan was for a daily diary of ländler, the Austrian country dance precursor of the more lasciviously civilized waltz. But gradually my pieces took on the ternary shapes of brief intermezzi with the ländler's simple, sixteen bar sentences left for what would become another set of enfolded variations.
My Ländler, then, aren't really ländler at all - although I was relieved to find that Schubert had experimented with a similar hybrid in 1827.
The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more reductive aesthetic and a somewhat fortuitous arrival at a kind of diatonic serialism.
“To devise patterns of feeling for noble souls is the most desirable of all callings.” -Goethe
credits
released July 19, 2023
Recorded at Patrych Studios, New York City, January 30th to February 3rd 2023.
Sessions produced and engineered by Joseph Patrych.
Edited, mixed, and mastered by Lachlan Bramble.
Artwork by Anne Chapman Smith.
Photography by Denis Smith.
CD design by Sam Songailo.
Executive Producer Luke Altmann.
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