Ross Edwards (born 23 December 1943) is an Australian composer of a wide variety of music including orchestral and chamber music, choral music, children's music, opera and film music. His distinctive sound world reflects his interest in deep ecology and his belief in the need to reconnect music with elemental forces, as well as restore its traditional association with ritual and dance. He also recognises the profound importance of music as an agent of healing. His music, universal in that it is concerned with age-old mysteries surrounding humanity, is at the same time connected to its roots in Australia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws inspiration, especially birdsong and the mysterious patterns and drones of insects. As a composer living and working on the Pacific Rim, he is aware of the exciting potential of this vast region.
Early life and education
Ross Edwards was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. His parents were Frank Edwards, an engineer, and Marjorie Robertson. His great-grandfather was the publisher George Robertson of Angus & Robertson. Drawn to music at an early age, his first attempts at composition date from his fourth year, but it was not until the age of 13, when taken to a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra by his aunt that featured Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Liszt's First Piano Concerto, that he became intensely aware of his vocation to become a composer.Murdoch, James. Australia’s Contemporary Composers. Macmillan, 1972.
Edwards attended Sydney Grammar School,Pleskun, Stephen. A Chronological History of Australian Composers and their Compositions. Volume 2. Xlibris , 2012. which did not offer music at the time. At 15 years of age, Edwards was granted permission to enter the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music to study piano, oboe, harmony, counterpoint and theory during lunch hours and weekends. In 1963, after being awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship to the University of Sydney, he enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts degree, but became frustrated and dropped out after a year. Due to the benevolent intervention of composers Peter Sculthorpe and Peter Maxwell Davies, he was able to earn a scholarship and complete a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Adelaide's Elder Conservatorium in 1969, where his teachers included Peter Maxwell Davies (then composer-in-residence), Sándor Veress and Richard Meale. During vacations he worked as assistant to Peter Sculthorpe, gaining valuable insight into the working life of a composer.Hannan, Michael Francis. Ross Edwards – A Unique Sound World. APRA, March 1986. Southern Cross University. 1986 A further Commonwealth Scholarship enabled Edwards to complete his studies with Peter Maxwell Davies in London in 1970, earning a Master of Music degree, after which he spent 18 months composing at a remote Yorkshire farmhouse. Today, Edwards holds higher doctorates from the Universities of Sydney and Adelaide.
Returning to Sydney in 1970, Edwards taught in the Music Department of Sydney University and in 1974 married Helen Hopkins, one of his students.Cummings, David. International Who's who in Music and Musicians' Directory. Psychology Press, 2000. In the same year he became a lecturer in the Sydney Conservatorium's School of Composition, remaining there until 1980, when he began working as a freelance composer and lecturer. Working from their home in the coastal village of Pearl Beach, Edwards and his wife Helen, a piano teacher, led an idyllic and productive life until the education of their two children necessitated moving back to Sydney in 1984.
Musical career
Reclusive by nature, Ross Edwards has largely eschewed following a career path as such, neglecting to promote his work and responding mainly to the inner dictates of his vocation. Based in Sydney and often retreating to work in the Blue Mountains west of the city, he has an acute sense of place and belonging, claiming to draw on his experience as "a composer living and working in Australia and relating to the world from an Australian perspective."Edwards, Ross. The tensions of making sacred art in a secular world. Component of the Barbara Blackman Lecture, Canberra International Music Festival, 2014. Far from being isolationist, however, the surface of Edwards' music is often highly eclectic, making oblique references to many cultures in what he describes as an "intuitive search for unity within diversity". He has also stated that underlying all his music "the natural environment remains the supreme generative force".
In spite of his natural reticence, Edwards' works have been featured at such international music festivals as the Vale of Glamorgan Festival, Wales; the Edinburgh International Festival; the Australian Festival of Chamber Music, Townsville; the Mostly Mozart Festival, New York; the City of London Festival; the Darwin International Guitar Festival; the Canberra International Music Festival; the Adelaide Festival; the Melbourne Festival; the Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival, Arizona; International Society for Contemporary Music Festivals in Stockholm, Basel, Warsaw and Sydney; and the Festivals of Sydney and Perth.
Significant events
Significant events include the award of a joint Australian Broadcasting Corporation/Australian Bicentennial commission to compose the violin concerto Maninyas (1988); the Australia Council's Don Banks Music Award (1989); Australian Creative "Keating" Fellowships in 1990 and 1995; and award of the Order of Australia – AM (1997). The composition of Dawn Mantras, Sydney's contribution to the millennium celebrations, was telecast worldwide to an audience of billions, attracting great international acclaim. In 2007 he was Musica Viva Australia's Featured Composer.
Collaborations
In 2005, Edwards' oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming, originally composed for oboist Diana Doherty and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, had its US premiere by Doherty, the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel, after which it was toured worldwide and received enthusiastically. Another notable success was the 2010 UK premiere of the violin concerto Maninyas, given at the 2010 Edinburgh International Festival by its dedicatee, Dene Olding, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy. This work has also gained international popularity through choreography for dance, notably by Stanton Welch for the San Francisco Ballet. Another Welch/Edwards collaboration, the ballet Zodiac, was successfully premiered by the Houston Ballet in 2015. Edwards' music, with its unique rhythms, has a natural affinity with dance.
Another important collaboration with Australian saxophonist Amy Dickson, who now lives in London has produced three new works: the saxophone concerto Full Moon Dances (2012); the double concerto Frog and Star Cycle, for whose 2016 premiere Dickson was paired with the Scottish percussionist Colin Currie and accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and Bright Birds and Sorrows, which Dickson premiered at the 2017 Musica Viva Festival in Sydney with the Elias String Quartet, visiting from the UK.
Musical style and philosophy
Early period: the influence of the natural world
In the early 1970s Edwards experienced an unexpected crisis. Disenchanted by the European music of the time, which was itself in crisis due to the waning of the Modernist movement, he found himself unable to compose for several years.Edwards, Ross. Reflections Transforming Art (ed. Nigel Hoffman) 4.1 (1992a): 28–30. Having returned to Australia due to the terminal illness of his mother, and while lecturing at the Sydney Conservatorium, he moved in 1974 with his wife and infant son to the village of Pearl Beach, north of Sydney, where his sister-in-law had a holiday house.Featherstone, Don. The Dance of Nature. 1995. Clips may be viewed here Pearl Beach, which adjoined the Brisbane Water National Park "buzzing with wildlife", had an immediate effect on him and his work. "The summer days were swathed in the drones of cicadas with their mysteriously abrupt starts and stops and, at evening, the insects would start up. I was entranced by the insect chorus because it seemed to be on the verge of conveying some profound message which was ultimately elusive. All the temporal relationships in my music – the relative lengths of phrases and sections – are influenced by these ancient voices, whose near-symmetries and inconsistently varied repetitions often seem close to our inherited musical syntax. I don’t doubt that, over the millennia, such voices have generated much of the world’s music and it’s not hard to detect their presence in various surviving folk and religious traditions".
Austerity and contemplation: the Sacred Series and beyond
The result of Edwards' move to Pearl Beach was a leap from the fierce complexity of some of his earlier work to a series of austere, meditative compositions (e.g., Tower of Remoteness (1978) and Etymalong (1984)), which became known as his Sacred Series, based on close listening to and absorption of the complex sound of the natural environment combined with his reading of Zen texts and commentaries.Stanhope, Paul. The Music of Ross Edwards – Aspects of Ritual. Master of Arts (Honours) Thesis. University of Wollongong, 1994.
To Edwards' surprise, these skeletal compositions "found favour with the apostles of Orthodox Modernism," unaware that their position was being quietly subverted. It became vividly apparent, however, when, in 1982, his Piano Concerto burst upon the scene. "Some other pieces I wrote in the 1980s, however, ruffled establishment feathers both here and abroad and all but destroyed my reputation as a so-called serious composer. The most notorious example is, without doubt, my Piano Concerto, composed in Pearl Beach in 1982. My original intention for this work was to compose something … stark and introspective, but some unseen force seemed to dictate otherwise. In what seemed like a moment of sheer revelation, the outside world burst in on me and I suddenly became aware that I had the extraordinary privilege of living in a paradise of sun-blessed ocean and joyously shrieking parrots gyrating in the warm air, and that this ecstasy simply had to be transmitted through music. Conformist critics, especially English ones, gave me hell but, fortunately, the public responded positively, and this remains one of my most popular pieces."
What followed was a process of integrating extreme positions – of gradually developing a musical language that spoke both to Edwards himself and, through him, to those prepared to listen. In the 1980s, the response to his music began to gain momentum, divided between the enthusiasm of those who perceived it as fresh direction – "a statement of independence from the impetus of cultural globalism" – and those who saw it as "a betrayal of Modernist idealism".Koehne, James. A sense of place. CD liner notes: Edwards and Sibelius violin concertos. Canary Classics, 2011 Edwards largely stayed aloof from these so-called "style wars", seeking his own instinctual voice in the midst of controversy.
The Maninya style: the dance of nature