Inspired by a frozen continent
Photo credit: Elizabeth Kerr
A few years ago I travelled to the Antarctica Peninsula from Argentina. We boarded a converted research vessel at Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world, and bounced for forty hours across the Drake Passage, one of the world’s roughest stretches of water. After that crossing, for me the ten-day journey was all about the visual inspiration and stillness of that extraordinary, frozen, quiet and spacious world. Everywhere you looked was a pristine and heart-stoppingly beautiful vista of black water, ice floes and the dramatic turquoise of old ice. It felt utterly peaceful.
For composer Ihlara McIndoe, this year's NYO Composer in Residence, the Antarctic inspiration was sonic. McIndoe travelled to Antarctica in 2020 as an "Inspiring Explorer" with the Antarctic Heritage Trust. While there, she collected audio recordings and her composition Ephemeral Bounds, premiered this month by the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, is one of several creative projects inspired by the sights and particularly the sounds she found in the icy expanses of the frozen continent.
“I had no idea what sorts of sounds I might hear," she said when she returned, "and it was incredible to find so many that I didn’t expect. One amazing experience was when we were kayaking, and a big piece of ice calved off a nearby iceberg. It made this incredible noise and the force was overwhelming, sending large swells in our direction. The water became calm again, but after a couple of minutes there was a big burst from under the ocean as the ice came up again. It was breath-taking to witness the immense power of the environment.”
Composer Ihlara McIndoe
“…the immense power of the environment.”
Photo credit: Owain John/Antarctic Heritage Trust
McIndoe’s orchestral score for Ephemeral Bounds is prefaced by a stanza of poetry:
Limitations are temporary. Bursts of momentum, fleeting.
We swing on a pendulum: exploring, preserving...exploiting, polluting.
I am floating on black waters, surrounded by sleeping giants.
Snowflakes in my eyelashes, I watch the stars appear.
The silence is deafening.
Her atmospheric and beautifully-structured work, performed in Auckland and Wellington, began in darkness. Gradually lights came on at music stands in aisles in gallery and stalls around the whole auditorium, rather like random stars in a dark sky. Musical sounds, some very quiet, emerged from the semi-darkness: a pianissimo harmonic series from a string instrument high in the gallery, short motives on wind instruments, the pianist on stage stroking the strings inside the piano and then more wide-ranging effects, even the deep growls of the contrabassoon. “The players,” the programme note explains, “remain unfettered by conventional divisions of time, able to choose for themselves how long their ephemeral gestures last.”
McIndoe’s ten-minute work is wonderfully evocative of the peace and spaciousness of the Antarctic. The composer's imaginative use of instrumental timbres and audacious approach to orchestral writing surprised, captured and entranced the large audience.
Ihlara McIndoe in the Antarctic
“…intrepid exploration and risk-taking…”
Photo credit: Marcus Waters/Antarctic Heritage Trust
In a short Q & A with conductor Gemma New after the premiere, McIndoe paid tribute to her mentor, composer Salina Fisher, another young star in our composing firmament. This adventurous work suggests that McIndoe’s inspiration was not only the sounds and sights of the Antarctic but also the sense of intrepid exploration and risk-taking the continent represents.
Ephemeral Bounds for orchestra by Ihlara McIndoe
Premiere performances by the NZSO National Youth Orchestra conducted by Gemma New in Auckland and Wellington, July 3 and 10, 2021. Recorded by RNZ Concert for future broadcast.