Diapsalmata - Performance Notes
Welcome to Diapsalmata!
I am delighted to welcome you to Christian College for this very special second performance of the evocative and wonderful music of Kym Alexandra Dillon and Salina Fischer. I am delighted to share such a wonderful program with you and to provide Kym with a large and expansive canvas to work with. It is essential artists get the opportunity to present large-scale works, and I am thrilled Forest can present these brilliant works and provide Kym with a large ensemble with all the bells and whistles for the new song cycle for the brilliant Stephen Marsh, Diapsalmata.
Forest Collective was delighted to present the world premiere of Diapsalmata in 2022, and we’re delighted to be bringing this work to the community of Geelong that Kym calls home, with the support of the City of Greater Geelong.
You’re welcome to document your experience on your phone, however, please respect your fellow concert-goers. And be sure to tag us! #forestcollective @forestcollective
Be sure to join Forest Collective for our next performance Black Water, a one-woman opera telling the story of Mary Jo Kopechne’s suspicious death and WAVES (WAVE), a new interdisciplinary theatre work from director and painter Jahman Devine, with new music by myself.
- Evan J Lawson, artistic director.
Forest Collective acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live, meet, create, and perform this performance, Wadawurrung Country.
We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend our respects to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past and present. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs, and relationship with the land. We recognise Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of this nation.
Komorebi for Violin and Vibraphone (2014)
Music by Salina Fisher
Helen Bower violin
Zela Papageorgiou percussion
This is my response to the beautiful Japanese word ‘Komorebi’ which means ‘sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees’. The piece is based on the Ryukyu mode of Okinawa, Japan.
Komorebi won the 2014 New Zealand School of Music Composers Competition.
-Salina Fisher.
Sonata for Flute and Piano
Music by Kym Alexandra Dillon
Brighid Mantelli flute (guest musician)
Kym Dillon piano (guest musician)
The idea of an artist 'representing' nature is an inherently fascinating one to me; it seems inevitable when seeking to capture or evoke nature in art that the resulting work will be a cocktail of the maker's own visual experience, technique, stylistic leanings, memories, life circumstances, subconscious workings, and other mysterious things. Such an exercise can be as much about the mind and story of the artist as it is about the phenomena they are seeking to represent.
My Sonata for Flute and Piano doesn't seek to avoid this but rather embraces it: its three movements are directly inspired by specimens in nature, sometimes in very direct ways, but along the way this process is in inseparable conversation with my own artistic and emotional intuitions, as well as conventions and expectations arising from Western musical traditions. It is a work that revels in the personal and opaque quest of 'representing' through the abstract language of music, and it welcomes and celebrates a resulting multiplicity of interpretations from other listeners.
Each movement bears the name of a flower that holds an iconic status in the Surfcoast region of Victoria, Australia. These flowers have a strange, alien beauty and allure for me; their existence and makeup seems worlds away from that of human beings, yet they fascinate us and draw us closer. In this piece my observing and contemplating of each flower's characteristics, as well as my own experience of them, transforms into musical material and language which then has a life of its own, guided by representations, intuitions, traditions, and discoveries.
The first movement, beginning with an abstract evocation of the sound of waves crashing on the beach, is a Fantasia inviting us into the strange world of the carpobrotus rossii ("Australian pig face”)
In the second the busy beauty of the leucopogon parviflorus ("coastal beard-heath") gives rise to a theme and variations in the spirit of a scherzo.
The third, lento, contemplates the awesome structure and stark colours of the leptospermum laevigatum ("coastal tea-tree"), drawing us little by little ever inwards to the centre.
I have dedicated this work to my friend Brighid Mantelli, whose spellbinding flute playing inspired me to write this work
- Kym Alexandra Dillon
Diapsalmata: Portrait of a Self
Music by Kym Alexandra Dillon
Text from Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death by Søren Kierkegaard
Translated by Alastair Hannay (used with permission)
Alex MacDonald Viola
Caerwen Martin Cello (guest musician)
Evan J Lawson Conductor
Glavier Aldana Noriega harp
Helen Bower Violin
Kym Alexandra Dillon Piano, composer, guest curator
Hamish Upton Percussion (guest musician)
Ian Crossfield Double Bass
Natasha Conrau Violin (guest musician)
Noah Lawrence Cello (guest musician)
Phoebe Smithies Horn
Rosanne Hunt Cello
Ryan Lynch Clarinet
Sara Rafferton Bassoon (guest musician)
Stephen Marsh Baritone voice (guest musician)
Zela Papageorgiou Percussion
Diapsalmata: Portrait of a Self is a song cycle primarily comprising of settings of a selection of the fragments found in the opening portion of Søren Kierkegaard's book Either/Or, a section given the mysterious title of 'Diapsalmata'. Although these fragments take the form of prose they nevertheless have a poetic spirit to them; to me they come across as the troubled and sometimes contradictory thoughts and journalings of a soul in a state of deep despair, cynicism and fluctuating identity.
These texts have a rather profound connection to my own life and story, which is the inspiration for this piece. In late 2020, after much soul searching, I had finally gotten to the heart of own my consistent, ambient experience of despair, wherein I did not feel like a real person but rather an artificial construction, a dream. This was an experience that I had always accepted as merely an unavoidable anomaly of my brain, I did not anticipate it would ever have an 'answer' -- it was the way I would always have to be, or so I thought.
It turns out in the end that I was transgender. As a teenager, in order to subdue my pain due to the changes of this time and survive going forward I had subconsciously buried myself inside my mind, erecting a sort of abstraction or character in my place. It was as this abstraction that I lived over 15 years of my life, during which I did not feel like a real person, but rather an artificial construction that I could fashion any way I wanted to. Upon realising what had happened to me, resurfacing, and deciding that my path was to transition, my seemingly endless experiences of despair and artificiality ceased, and I felt like a genuine person -- I have felt this way ever since.
After such a long and troubled chapter of my life was closing, I was moved to write a kind of swan song to this 'self' I had created. Although the years I had spent buried beneath it were very dark, I nevertheless recognised that this character had carried me thus far, like an ark, so it felt right to me to mark this occasion with a kind of ritual.
I had felt deeply connected to the Diapsalmata texts when I first read them in their impactful English translation by Alastair Hannay; their mixture of dark comedy, cynicism and existential despair spoke to 'me' directly, and that connection remained throughout the years up until my transition -- I no longer connected strongly with the thoughts contained in them after that. As such they are for me a kind of time capsule, a snapshot of the self I was trying to live as. The music flows directly from the texts themselves, with moments of stylistic pastiche connecting with imagery in the text as well as the cycle of personal re-making that I experienced in my past life. When taken together these individual settings are like links in a chain which evokes my own story.
Apart from the core settings from the Diapsalmata, I have framed the work with spoken excerpts from a much later work of Kierkegaard's, The Sickness Unto Death. This book describes the lack of 'personhood' I experienced with remarkable clarity and insight, and I am not the first to make a link between this book and the transgender experience. I have labelled these sections of the work 'prologues', and in them we step out of the dark world of the Diapsalmata texts into a kind of psychological waiting room, where in a brief refreshing moment of insight (or hindsight) the truth is seen, spoken, diagnosed.
The word 'Diapsalmata' is Kierkegaard's own concoction, and its blending of the familiar and the cryptic makes it an apt title for this work. The subtitle, 'Portrait of a Self', is my own; on the moment-to-moment level this is a collection of settings of the Diapsalmata, but when heard together the complete collage forms my own Portrait of a Self.
I wish to thank The City of Greater Geelong for awarding us the grant needed to make this this concert a reality; Alastair Hannay for his permission and enthusiastic support of my using his translations; Evan Lawson for conducting this work with his signature musicianship, dedication and heart, Forest Collective for not only their incredible artistry but also their sincere investment in this piece and its story, and of course the one-of-a-kind Stephen Marsh, without whom this work would never have been written. I’m so glad we can share in this experience together again.
-Kym Alexandra Dillon
