Music of Memory

Music of Memory is a reimagining for string orchestra of three earlier works of mine, all of which pay tribute to friends and colleagues who had passed away in recent years. Despite the memorial nature of this music, it was important to me that the works also captured something of the energy and essence of who these people were when they were alive, in addition to expressing a sense of loss and sadness on their passing.

Hence, prior to the slow unfolding of the longer, requiem-laden final movement, “Between the Spaces in the Sky”, which commemorates the tragically premature death of the wonderful British conductor and former Artistic Director of Opera Australia, Richard Hickox, the first two movements offer brief glimpses into two striking, yet very different personalities and life stories.

The opening work, “Angels’ Wings (Music for Yodit)” started life as a piano piece and evolved into this essay for strings in memory of Yodit Tele, an Eritrean woman who migrated to the UK as a refugee from her homeland’s harsh internal politics in 2008. She married the Scottish music journalist and founder of classical label Toccata Classics, Martin Anderson, shortly before her untimely early death from cancer in 2015. It’s a slow, floating chorale coloured by the lively flutter of wings in high solo violins.

The middle movement, “György Meets the Girl Photographer”, is a rhythmic, faux-Eastern European dance which pays homage to the irrepressibly effervescent and feisty American arts philanthropist and “girl photographer” (her own description), Betty Freeman, who died in 2009 at the age of 87. She lived a long and full life as a major force in the Los Angeles arts world. How I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Betty met and photographed the composer György Ligeti in the early 90’s, the inspiration for this somewhat Hungarian-sounding music, although perhaps two such enormous personalities may have been too much for one room!
Brett Dean, 2023