Three Mystic Dances (2022)

A concert in the 2021 Adelaide Festival’s Chamber Music series curated by my friend Kim Williams, which included Erik Satie’s Trois Gnossienne, performed by Stephanie McCallum, rekindled my interest in this enigmatic composer and led to the composition of Three Mystic Dances for flute, harp and viola.

Like those of Satie, my pieces are slow, quiet, and repetitive – designed as musical objects of contemplation for our uncertain times.

The first, a canon based on a mediaeval Marian chant, is adapted from an interlude in my 1967 nativity play Quem Quaeritis. Reference to a simple folk tale of wonderment at a miraculous birth expresses hope – however forlorn – for the beginning of a fresh, enlightened cycle for humankind. The second, which began life as a child-like piano piece for four hands, I extracted and reconstituted from my 2001 set of bagatelles titled A Flight of Sunbirds.

The final piece seemed to unfold with minimal intervention from my conscious mind, allowing me to step back and calmly watch it happen. At least that’s how it felt to me – and I’d recommend a similarly detached approach to listening.

Three Mystic Dances, dedicated to Kim Williams and Catherine Dovey, was composed especially for Jonathan Henderson, flute; Emily Granger, harp; and James Wannan, viola. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the commissioners: Graham and Judy Tribe, Anne de Salis and Martin Barge, Alice Simpson and Robbie Feyder, Duncan Peppercorn, Sarah and David Howell and The Old School Artist Artist-in-Residence Program at Mt. Wilson in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales.