Author: Jack Symonds

(2021 – 2022)

Duration: c. 20 minutes

Commissioned by the Australian String Quartet for the London season of ANAM Quartetthaus through the Australian String Quartet Richard Divall Australian Music Fund

World premiere: 18 October, 2022, Adelaide Town Hall

Part One: an abnormality of growth

1. Andante amoroso
2. Scherzo I
3. Scherzo II (in imitazione) – Trio (senza energia) – Scherzo II (con difetti)
4. Finale I

Part Two: a continuity of paradoxes

1. Adagio inquieto
2. Scherzino interrotto
3. Adagio stagnante
4. Finale II
5. Finale III

These two movements pursue similar material from radically different perspectives. The first begins with a wide-ranging cello melody ornamented with a quicksilver muted violin mapping out the same harmonic landscape again and again, providing most of the work’s content in embryonic form. This then calms down into a true slow movement. The ‘abnormalities’ of this Part refer to the quirk of the material growing too quickly for a ‘normal’ development of the structure, forcing the music to change into radically different forms and expressions. Scherzo I alternates violence and entropy in an unstable manner before coalescing into the strict canons of Scherzo II. The dissipation of energy in this Scherzo generates a true Trio section, struggling to regain direction. Its eventual resumption (‘with defects’) menacingly grinds the music into mechanistic repetition and dissolution. Finale I polyphonically grows the fragments of the opening cello melody in multiple directions simultaneously, eventually proliferating and accelerating out of control.

Part Two’s ‘continuity of paradoxes’ attempts to force together music built on irreconcilable differences. It begins with a dyad slowly ‘bleeding out’ into uncomfortable fragments of faster music. These become the dominant idea and prepare the way for another Scherzo, this one cut into by windows to wholly opposing material. When this spins itself to quizzical extinction, the piece finds its still, Adagio centre – but it proves too slow for ‘productive’ development. Nervous repeated-note twitches finally provide the key to opening Finale II, a do-over of Finale I from Part One but in a far slower tempo. Many of the developmental ‘problems’ of the original are given potential solutions, and the entropic and oppositional forces are reconciled. The key out of the quartet-labyrinth is a third Finale for this two-movement work, gathering together the piece’s entire material in a fast toccata which nonetheless gets stuck on loop: is it resolved, finished or simply gives up?

WATCH Australian String Quartet’s performance at the Sydney Opera House

https://stream.sydneyoperahouse.com/videos/australian-string-quartet-performs-jack-symonds-string-quartet-no-2

Trakl-Pictures for String Quartet (2013)

Duration: c. 14 minutes

The four unequal movements of this string quartet are snapshots from the lurid poetry of Austrian Expressionist Georg Trakl.

The first two movements are fragments; question marks. The first is a slow swirl of uncertainty, the second a warped descent. The third movement is fast, and obsesses over hard scraps of theme with the gears constantly shifting. The fourth movement is a numbed night-vision which looks up at a cold sky and sees the rest of the piece disappear out of sight.

Commissioned by Carriageworks

First performance: 17 August 2013, Carriageworks, Sydney by the JACK Quartet

View the complete score here

for soprano, viola/viola d’amore & clarinet (2014)

Duration: c. 9 minutes

Rilke’s Die Engel and Lösch mir die Augen aus are two poems which display his visionary conception of the spiritual and of love.

In Die Engel, the five movements of the composition cut across Rilke’s text overlaying a new structure on his mystical evocation of a terrifying angel. The ‘Alpha-and-Omega’ quality of this figure is here represented by palindromes both exact and inexact. The outer movements are exact palindromes, the second and fourth fast movements are gestural palindromic variations, and the central slow movement contains palindromic interval shapes.

In contrast, Liebeslied fanatically dissects Rilke’s extraordinary nine-line evocation of a love so powerful it can transcend the body into a nine-part form made of collections of genre pieces, each colouring a single line. First come a series of four variations on a chord, widening the expressive extreme until almost breaking. Next is a pair of Hommages- the first is to Salvatore Sciarrino, where the ‘breaking’ is here achieved with his characteristic splintered quietude. Next is a genuflection to Hans Werner Henze- describing hands and hearts-, which strings together tiny splinters from some of his most rapturous passages. Finally, three quick canons all run together, contorting themselves in increasingly complex contrapuntal formations until a canon at the unison ties an open-ended knot. 

Commissioned by Jane Sheldon for performance at her first Symbiosis Concert, 18 July 2014

Performed by Jane Sheldon (soprano), James Wannan (viola/ viola d’amore) and Jason Noble (clarinet)

Score sample here

Five nocturnes for solo piano (2021)

Duration: c. 17.5 minutes (2’30” + 4’30” + 3’30” + 3’30” + 3’30”)

Guardare, meravigliarsi… is a collection of five nocturnes, each of which attempts to create the illusion of a multiplicity of layers within a single instrument. The title is from a recurring libretto line and musical figure in Luigi Dallapiccola’s major opera Ulisse: “Guardare, meravigliarsi, e tornar a guardare” (‘to gaze, to marvel, and to return to gazing”), representing the questing, visionary spirit of Ulysses, as well as being a metaphor for the process of composition itself. 

1. Notturno sospeso: a rising figure separates the registers of the keyboard into something like a ‘sky’ and a ‘sea’, with a ‘suspended’ melody poised to dip downwards at any moment. 

2. Notturno in riflessione: one single melody is ‘reflected’ softly into the middle register; a world of mirrors where every figure is sometimes exactly imitated and at others distorted.

3. Notturno ghiacciato: A slow, 3-part canon ‘freezes’ into a landscape of widely-spaced chords from which tendrils of the opening almost succeed in escaping.

4. Notturno in ommagio: The opening bar of Gabriel Fauré’s mysterious final Nocturne slips into a hommage-commentary on Fauré’s own pianistic world, before atomising into a wild middle section of keyboard extremes. The return of the Fauré material extinguishes into silence.

5. Notturno corrente: ‘Flowing’ from one idea to the next, this nocturne takes the material of the other four and creates continuity. Its final slow section is a commentary on the phrase from Dallapiccola, finding an uneasy repose somewhere between his harmonic practice and my own.

These nocturnes may be played individually or in any combination/ shorter sequence, however if Nocturne No. 5 is performed, it must always be played last.

Some suggested alternative orders:

2, 4, 5
4, 1, 5
3, 5
1, 4, 2
1, 3, 4, 5

Score samples here

for flute and five musicians (2019 – 2020)

Duration: c. 19 minutes

This flute concerto burrows into the processes of remembering. How can music ‘remember’ – other people, other notes? The first movement is a decayed memory of the opening of Allan Pettersson’s Thirteenth Symphony, a work of extreme instability and energetic violence seen from afar, after time has perhaps erased much of its anger – what is left?

The central movement creates a representation of ‘Damnatio Memoriae’ – a purging from society’s collective memory, or a rewriting of history. A series of variations progressively have their musical ‘identities’ erased by a repeating gesture that attempts to extinguish the soloist – here cast as an antagonist to be purged from the landscape.

The final movement considers the Hapax – something that only occurs once in a work. Would we recognise and remember if it we heard it? Curlicues of bass flute melody infold themselves in a hall of mirrors where all events are reflected and repeated except one – the key to unlocking the piece. 

Memory was commissioned by Ensemble Offspring

First performance: 28 October 2021, Sydney Opera House Utzon Room by Lamorna Nightingale (flutes) with Ensemble Offspring (Jason Noble, Thibaud Pavlovic-Hobba, Chris Pidcock, Ben Kopp & Claire Edwardes) conducted by Jack Symonds

Listen to the work performed by Lamorna Nightingale, Ensemble Offspring cond. Jack Symonds

View the complete score here

for soprano, piano and string sextet (2020 – 2021)

Duration: c. 12 minutes

This song cycle is a portrait of the German fin-de-siècle poet Richard Dehmel. Lines and stanzas from five of Dehmel’s poems are woven together to give glimpses of a world vision which trembles on the brink of Expressionism, seeped through with an mystical, weary Romanticism. I have attempted to create a continuity of image from the storms of desire (Ansturm) through the haunted, nocturnal ‘blossoming’ of death-soaked flowers (Maiblumen blühten überall), a gnomic vision of a lonely, inhuman place (Aufblick) leading to a chilling apparition (Erwartung) and finally, the ambiguous horror of true recognition (Die stille Stadt). 

Blühen is commissioned by the Adelaide Festival of Arts and the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide as recipient of the John Bishop Memorial Commission 2020.

First performance: 5 March, 2021 UKARIA, Adelaide Festival by Jessica Aszodi (soprano), Jack Symonds (piano), Australian String Quartet, James Wannan & Blair Harris

View the complete score here