Southern Ocean was commissioned by Symphony Australia for the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Intervarsity Choir Festival and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn. The work is a setting for choir and orchestra of a new text by Margaret Scott and was composed in 1999. The text has beautiful and dramatic nautical imagery and is set in a town in southern Tasmania. It contrasts contemporary experience with the sometimes violent history of the town against a backdrop of the ocean’s many faces.

The piece falls into three large choruses and two dialogues for male and female voices. The mood of place and time and a commentary on addressing the past as we move towards the millennium emerge as themes in the outer sections; the middle sections are a series of optimistic reflections from the shore. The drama of the natural environment and the toughness of the human spirit in enduring natural and man-made storms are key ideas throughout.

The Southern Ocean was of interest because of the immensity of its natural forces as well as its imaginative and mythical position in the Australian consciousness – a vast ocean of unbroken waves, great icebergs and terrible peril for sailors (past and present) yet also the route for much migration to Australia in the nineteenth century. Hence, embodying hope and fear. The focus on the sea is important – the image of people struggling from the sea to create a new life seemed a good metaphor for the Anniversary of the Intervarsity choral movement; that is, extreme optimism and determination to create art and beauty in the face of any number of obstacles.

Musically, the idea of the unbroken wave that rises, propels and swamps within an ocean of continual momentum, was firmly in my mind.

© Andrew Schultz, 1999.

 

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Ocean by Margaret Scott (opening and closing sections)

The ocean is all about us, ever changing.

Lair of life, nurturer of the earth,

leisure’s dream and cold grey widow-maker,

it rises in savage tempest and tidal wave.

Among feeding swans it ripples in quiet coves,

lipping the sand like a child at the mother’s breast.

At the road’s turn it’s a shimmer of bridesmaids’ satin

cupped in hills, and from the headland extends

as a vast floor of sheen and shadowed blue

into distant haze. Beyond is mystery where

landbound imagination raises up cliffs of ice,

imprison’d ships and blizzards swirling out of the polar night.

So, under the wave, the inner eye builds visions

that serve to fortify the self or enters the glint of shell,

the whale’s pith, the delicate dance of mote and plant

and fish in loving curious acts of recreation.

_____

In summer the new millennium will dawn on New Year’s Day

and we’ll all look out from the headland at the gold that floods the bay.

All that is truly precious will shine in that rush of gold –

nothing that can be costed, nothing that can be sold.

The power to see into  strangeness and live in the ocean’s heart,

to join in the universal dance, and bear a gentle part.

 

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Andrew Schultz –  Southern Ocean (text by Margaret Scott)

Choir of the 50th Anniversary Australian Intervarsity Choral Festival and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn (Kynan Johns, chorus master), premiere performance, City Hall, Hobart, 17 July 1999.

 

 

© This recording is copyright and for private use only. It may not be broadcast or distributed without permission. CD-AIVCFCD00200.

 

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