Brett Dean talks Infinity

Brett Dean’s Fire Music is dedicated to the victims of the 2009 “Black Saturday” bushfires in Victoria, Australia. It will be the score for The Narrative of Nothing, Graeme Murphy’s work for the Infinity program. Co-commissioned by The Australian Ballet, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it premiered in Stockholm in 2011. Here, Brett chats with us about making the work.

Did the knowledge that Fire Music would be used for choreography influence your work?
It did, actually. Graeme said to me quite plainly from the outset: “Write the piece you want to write. Don’t worry about what I might make of it.” But I think the knowledge of it being the motor, the engine, for a piece of dance theatre was in the back of my mind, and quite happily so. I felt the piece going in certain rhythmic directions … [it] really takes off in certain moments. It has a high energy. Originally, that was to do with the dynamics and propulsion of fire; I’d spent a bit of time talking with a fire scientist from the CSIRO. But then it took on its own dynamic, and part of that was the knowledge that this would be used on stage.

Did the physics of fire provide you with a system for composition?
[The scientist] showed me maps, diagrams, even videos of fires that they’d tracked … but that was only one part of the story really, and in the end it didn’t correlate closely enough with where I wanted to go. Once the piece started to evolve in terms of sounds and motifs and energy of its own, it took on its own life – a bit like a fire, it just started spreading. [Parts of it] have a manic quality; it’s technically quite challenging, it has a very fast inner life, very fast passage work, but the main pulse of the piece is fairly steady – so it has these big bones, and this relentless pushing forward, all the while darting out in different directions.

In one part of Fire Music, you use electric guitar to signify the “momentous, dizzying heat” of Black Saturday. Have you used other sounds in that evocative way?
There are satellite groups of instruments that are out in the theatre … a lot of the fast, powerful fire music is heralded by [trumpet] fanfares that resound around the whole space. There’s something about the theatricality of the sound being all around you; someone who’d heard the piece said that it’s a bit like there’s no escape, like a fire. It envelops the whole space. There are quite a few electronic sounds, most of which come from natural sources. There are a lot of closely miked thunder-sheet sounds right at the opening. In there somewhere is a recording that I made myself of a scraping, booming door in the Old Melbourne Gaol.

Do you often use live recorded sound in your electronic work?
When I use electronics, I prefer the sound to be recorded, live sound, which will then take on a life of its own. I must say I’m not such a great fan of electronically generated sounds. They end up sounding so dated so quickly, even now when so much is possible. It’s like a TV show that’s even 10 years old – you’ll see an old phone, and suddenly it’s a time piece. Live-recorded sound is more timeless, and there’s something there that’s real, I like that. And I think that’s why it links up more successfully with the orchestral sound, in my opinion. As opposed to having the orchestra, and then this Dr Who sound component plonked on top of it.

Do you often compose for dance?
This work is the first time I’ve been specifically commissioned by a company to write a work for orchestra [that will be] danced. But it was a piece for dance that was one of the first international works of mine to get attention. That was a score for Jiří Kylián, for a work of his called One of a Kind. It wasn’t orchestral, it was just a solo cellist and the rest was electronic. Up until that point I didn’t know a huge amount about dance, and certainly not contemporary dance of his mould. That was an incredibly great way to start – at the top, with one of the masters!

You can hear Fire Music in the Infinity program,  which opens in Melbourne on 24 February and in Sydney on 5 April. Tickets on sale now.

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