Peter Tahourdin: San Diego Canons (1983)

Abstract

"I came to Australia from Britain in 1964 at the age of 35. A few years afterwards, in a radio interview, I was asked if living and working in Australia had influenced my music. I replied that the influence was an indirect one, that I felt freer in Australia to explore and expeti ment. Being so far from Europe had lifted the burden of the immense weight of the European tradition, so that I no longer felt artistically constrained by both the splendour and the limitations inherent in that tradition. It was not that I had ceased to value the richness of European music, nor that I wished to deny my cultural heritage, but that I felt I had simply escaped from its dominance. At the time I found it ironic, though perfectly understandable and desirable, that many of the students I taught in Australia sought to go to Europe, to rtudy there and to experience at first hand the same tradition I had so recently been glad to leave behind me. Now, twenty years later, I find that one of the glories of Australian music is its diversity; it explores many paths and owes allegiance to many different artistic sensibilities, whether they stem from within our own culture and environment, from Asia, from America or from Europe. This diversity, I believe, gives to Australian music a unique vitality that sadly is often appreciated rather better in other countries than it is in Australia itself. Australian painting, literature and cinema have already become firmly established in the international arena Australian music, happily, is beginning to follow suit. When foreign performers bring our own music back to us, no doubt we will more readily celebrate the musical riches that are so rapidly expanding amongst us. This suggests, of course, that Australian music has a cosmopolitan outlook, that it is healthily extrovert and dominated by no single tradition. It is this, I believe, that is ainong its greatest strengths. In my own music, given my English background, it is not surprising that my European roots are strongly evident. But in the twenty-four years I have lived in Australia, I have had plenty of opportunity to look around me. I have visited (and learnt from) America, India and South-East Asia, and I have returned to Europe. There is certainly a danger in diversity: it can too easily lead to ghbness, producing a half digested mishmash of nothing in particular. I hope this has not been so in the manner in which external influences have impinged upon me and have been reflected in my work. San Diego Canons came from a five week visit to the University of California at San Diego in 1980. In the Center for Music Experiment there is a unique collection of percussion instruments, c�reated over a number of years by various visitors to the University: suspended wooden discs of different sizes1 a similar array of metal discs, a drum supporting a row of steel rods that produce an ethereal scale of ascending pitches as the rods become progressively shorter, and of course many others. One evening I spent a couple of hours playing and recording these instruments, subsequently composing a short tape piece from the material I had recorded. However, I was not entirely satisfied with the result and decided to make another piece from the same material. In 1982 I visited Bali and, like many others, became fascinated by the life and culture I found there. Early in 1983, with the sound of Balinese music still strong in Beyond the moon Beyond the darkness Starkness my mind, I tackled the San Diego material again. The piece that resulted is a sequence of two and four part canons that links together these diverse percussive sonorities. Though originally designed for four spatially separate channels, the piece works well, I think, in its stereo format." -- Peter Tahourdin