Sounding the Ritual of Sensual Rebellion: Pacific-European Resonances

Cultural Resonances and Sensual Vision

The Asian cultural influence in my music has entered through friendship to accompany my European-based aesthetic. These cultural resonances are manifest in my music as erotically charged sonic ritual. A friendship with a Filipina poet has directed my imagination towards a more personal, Pacific-oriented sound world, in parallel with harmonic and structural influences from a European training. This mix reverberates through my earlier work into later material via interval-color [1] and timbre sonorities, Pacific— especially Filipino—"musical objects" and conceptual influences from Asia (living color, accelerating cathartic climax) within a European-trained structural sense (macrocosmic design, increasing and lengthening ratios). These resonances express, both intuitively and consciously, sensuously charged poetry born of a Pacific locale.

Poetry, Friendship and Pacific Resonances

My artistic friendship with the poet Merlinda Bobis helped change the way I write music. Her insistence on valuing the intuitive over the purely intellectual encouraged me to adapt my pitch processes away from the German School's serial techniques towards a more empirical approach. As a composer, I reacted against Schönberg's early use of strict linearity [2] and forward-propelled dissonant nonoctave harmony [3]. In my previous music, stepwise voicing had led to minor second clashes in order to generate a linear momentum. With Bobis's encouragement, however, I came to feel free to explore vertical sonorities without recourse to linearity. Empirically discovered interval-color became my driving force. While setting Bobis's poetry in my work Rituals for Soprano and String Quartet [4], I first began to consciously deploy coloristic minor second clashes free of voice leading in the middle movement, "Prancing." Octave resonance is added between soprano and cello in order to create minor ninth interval-color (see Fig. 6). In this respect I followed the Debussian tradition, in which harmony is used to establish an intrinsic harmonic color [5]. I see this French tradition as closely aligned to Pacific/Australian magpie eclecticism— especially in its drawing on the Eastern delight in sound color.

My engagement with the musical traditions of the Philippines was triggered by Bobis's suggestion that in order to express the Filipino resonances in her poetry I should explore Filipino musical resources. Traditional Moro percussion music, from the south of the Philippines, features the kulintang—a set of bossed bronze gongs set in a wooden frame, limited to a small number (eight, for example) [6]. The small number of available pitches creates the effect of harmonic stasis in which interval-color and rhythm are emphasized. "Prancing" approximates this effect by situating the cello's pitch material around open strings and featuring interval-colors (minor ninths, minor seconds) and short-short-long kulintang rhythmic fragments [7].

Fig. 6.

Bruce Crossman, extract from Rituals for Soprano and String Quartet (1996) third song, "Prancing," bars 132 to 136. The cello's coloristic minor seconds/ninths, short-short-long rhythms and open string resonances are inspired by Filipino kulintang music. (© Bruce Crossman. Courtesy of Merlinda Bobis.)

Fig. 7.

Bruce Crossman, extract from Daragang Magayon Cantata, bars 189 to 193. Borrowed kulintang rhythm and agong-inspired bass resonances are juxtaposed with contrary motion arpeggios in cathartic climax. (© Bruce Crossman. Courtesy of Merlinda Bobis.)

Moro percussion ensembles contain other gongs besides those of the kulintang. These include the agong, with its deep bass resonance. A single stroke creates a sensuous sound moment. This resonance inspired me in composing Daragang Magayon Cantata [8], another setting of Bobis's poetry. Growling minor second dissonances played low on the piano create a rich harmonic overtone resonance, with rubber stopping of the notes creating a gonglike timbre (see Fig. 7square notes). The effect is of a sensuous moment of sound. The single-entity focus is characteristic of Eastern music [9]. Cantata deploys this idea via the gonglike sound moments described; the effect is used extensively at the outset to suggest the poem's image of a half-lit spectre of a volcano crest peak. Bobis uses this image, drawn from the...