Do you notice a mistake?
The art of Liza Lim is a singular fabric woven of different compositional, cultural, and artistic threads. She describes her identity as “hyphenated” (between China, the home of her ancestors, and Australia, where she was born), which she has often observed from Europe (the Netherlands, Germany, Great Britain, etc.), and which implies that relationships between the different elements it contains are unstable, even ambivalent, resembling the crisscrossing of pathways, or the warp and weft of a cloth. Liza Lim often uses the language of textiles, of soft folds or rough stitches, of a veil stretched between an object and its observer, opening up a ritual space, as in Veil (1999) for seven instruments, or in The Weaver’s Knot (2013-2014) for string quartet, whose title refers to a sturdy knot that has been used for centuries in textile production.
Art such as this implies multiculturalism – what Lim sometimes refers to as “transculturalism” – which is a historical given in Australia, one of its foundational myths as a society. It is a myth, as Lim often underlines, whose brutality and inequality has been borne by its Aboriginal peoples. How to reinvent this historical given? How to find a way out of oppositions between Asian and Western-type societies? Liza Lim recalls in this vein that Chinese residents of Australia have maintained traditions and rituals that the Cultural Revolution forbid in China, and which, as a result, have been largely lost there. How can multiculturalism be a part of the creative process and define a language more rigorous and structurally articulated than the ‘crossover’ practiced by other composers, notably those with roots in countries of the Far and Middle East living in Europe and North America? From what place can musicians speak? What cultural authorities do they call upon? Lim has described the ways in which the notion of multiculturalism has come to represent a way of being in the world as an artist, a way of working that embraces both the idea of cultural exchange and intersection, and the understanding that there are differences within cultures that must be honored, as well1”.
Countless literary and musical allusions are threaded through the work of Liza Lim. In addition to Chinese and Australian culture, her most important influences, to which we will return, other significant influences to mention are: the alap of Indian raga in Inguz (Fertility) (1996) for clarinet and cello; the asymmetry of phrasing, a tension-generating silence, and the fluctuation between noise and timbre unique to Japanese tradition in Koto (1993), for eight instruments; the ecstatic and intimate Sufism of Hafez in Tongue of the Invisible (2010-2011) for piano, baritone, and sixteen instruments. References to the Persian poetry of Djalâl ad-Dîn Rûmî sparkle in The Alchemical Wedding (1996), for ensemble; The Heart’s Ear (1997), for flute, clarinet, and string quartet, whose initial phrase is based on a melody for Turkish ney; Ecstatic Architecture (2001-2004), for orchestra, which premiered at the grand opening of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall; and Immer Fliessender (2004), for orchestra, whose title recalls Mahler and the prologue to the Ninth Symphony in the Vienna of a crumbling empire, seen here as if through a window opened up from the Ottoman Empire, just beyond the border…
Her instrumental approach often brings these cultural mixings to the foreground: the timbres, at once “together” and “apart,” play out in lines that adopt more or less the same contour, but slightly altered, with other stresses and other ornamentations. For example, in Yuè Lìng Jié (Moon Spirit Feasting) (1999) – a Chinese ritual street opera for three voices and ensemble – flute, clarinet, saxophone, trumpet, percussion, and cello perform alongside a koto (Japanese zither) and an erhu (Chinese spike fiddle). The work is non-religious, not strictly a ritual, but seeks to establish a community, albeit filtered through its own diaspora. Other examples include Burning House (1995), for koto and voice; The Alchemical Wedding (1996), which includes an erhu; the video installation Sonorous Bodies (1999), with koto; orMachine for Contacting the Dead (1999-2000), for twenty-seven musicians, whose central section returns to the timbres of the Chinese qin (a plucked instrument with seven open strings) as well as to other aspects of its repertoire. Lim describes the qin as emblematic for her of the ways in which the physical world and its sensuality, visceral experience, are enmeshed in the subtle realm of the energetic; to her, it is a physical manifestation of the way the tactile and the world of dreams can be intertwined2. Those familiar with the instrument know to listen not only to the plucking of the strings, but to the way the fingers caress the string once it has been plucked. There is a spiritual dimension to this noise, considered to be the instrument’s breath. Liza Lim uses the qin again in dialogue with a soprano voice in The Quickening (2004-2005), after Yang Lian.
The hybrid nature of Lin’s instrumental palette stands out in The Compass (2005-2006), a work featuring renewed focus on Australia (which the composer began to intensify in 2006) and one of the country’s distinctive instruments, the digeridoo. The work twines the instrument’s physical traits and the telluric symbolism of its raspy voice together with a large, Western-style orchestra and a solo flute. Themes of fire, earth, breath, and chant also run through The Compass, drawn from Aboriginal culture. (These cultural references return in Ochred String (2007) for oboe, viola, cello, and double bass, and in Pearl, Ochre, Hair String (2009-2010) for orchestra, whose titles refer to two elements used in birth, initiation, marriage, burial, healing, fertility, love, and witchcraft rituals, and which are associated with material transformation and spiritual states: dampened ochre used as pigment and string made from human hair rubbed with ochre and animal fat.)
Hybridity is not merely geographic, however. It is historical, as well, with careful attention to authenticity in instrument building and the musical language associated with it. Thus The Navigator (2008), an opera in six scenes and a prelude, for five vocalists, sixteen instruments, and electronics, with libretto by Patricia Sykes, combines a baroque trio (recorder, baroque harp, and viola d’amour, which dominate most of Scene 2, sub-titled “Sensorium”), a modern ensemble (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, percussion, and strings), an electric guitar, and sound design. The Ganassi recorder is used as a solo instrument, notably in the Prelude. “The Ganassi flourished in 15th century Venice in a school of recorder playing that was highly virtuosic and full of extravagant ornamentations. As an instrument, it was associated with the supernatural, the melancholic, the pastoral and the erotic. […] I love the expressivity of the Ganassi recorder - the immediacy that the sound has, with its closeness to breath - it registers every subtle shift and nuance in the body3”, Liza Lim explains. She returns to this instrument in other pieces derived from The Navigator — Weaver of fictions (2007): The long forgetting (2007), Sensorium (2007), as well as in The Guest (2010), a concerto for recorder (baroque, Ganassi, and basset recorder) and orchestra.
The instrumental formations used accumulate strata, which bump up against each other or blend together harmoniously, and in which each instrument intervenes with its own acoustic and aesthetic qualities, carrying the memory of its repertoire and with respect for its own expressiveness. The result is a great richness of timbres, of gestures, and of moods. Instead of a smoothed-over whole, Lim builds situations in which differences may be flattened out or exacerbated to the point of friction. In Invisibility (2009), for cello in scordatura tuning, multiple degrees of pressure on the strings are specified (light, harmonic; medium, between noise and timbre; normal), the left hand at times muffling the strings so that only the sound of the bow hair is heard. Two types of bow follow each other, and are then combined: the first is an ordinary bow, and the second is what the composer calls a “guiro bow”, whose hair is wrapped around the stick, so that the two materials alternate as the bow is drawn across the string, creating a granular, unstable sound. Like a landscape of unpredictable rifts where, nevertheless, all movements become audible. The corporeal nature of the instrument and its interactions with the person performing on it are manifest: “The body is the place of ecstasy – it has its own ‘weathers’ and dynamical systems, shimmering patterns of physical, cognitive and affective precipitations that are continually shifting and transforming. In my musical language, the enculturated body with its rituals and ways of experiencing the world creates abstract structural patterns that approach the raw physical phenomena of sound in search of an intensity of experience, in search of a ways of opening to ‘suddenness’ or ‘excess’, in search of a staging of pure presence, in search of patterns of ecstasy4”.
As we see, for Liza Lim, the coexistence of cultures in geography and history is less of a concern than the coexistence of these things in one’s own self, which arranges and orders them in other ways, and in so doing establishes ‘limits’ – not impassable borders, but permeable boundaries. Discussing the way Chinese cultures and structures have been defined from within the space of Australian culture, the composer has proposed the metaphor of fault lines, along which different elements rub up against each other, collide, and break apart5. Multiculturalism puts together differences, diffracts elements of interiority and supposes an archipelago of entities that travel – physically, metaphorically, and culturally; imagines that travel as an odyssey or a desert crossing, taking up the task of linking together. Not at all a linear pathway from one place to another, or, even less, from cause to effect – and, in opera, not at all narrative in form or carrying the features of a psychological drama – constellations, massed entities and open lines, composed of interruptions, suspensions, and forking paths, reflect the image of a “hyperworld” in motion, mobile and polyvalent. And so this musical form, attentive to the energies it teases out, may be characterized as total, “climatic” and “simultaneist.” (Lim draws analogies with acupuncture’s approach to the human body, where a needle placed at a point in the ankle might have a healing effect on the lungs). Above all, though, Lim’s multiculturalism implies that geographic, historical, cultural, and even sexual identity are never fixed; identity is a thing that redefines and rebuilds itself all the time. This idea sheds light on the mobility of instrumental and vocal sound: vibratos, micro-intervals, trills, multiphonics, distortions, veils, turbulences, continuous points of perforation and modulation of sound elements that are disjointed or assembled in ways that reject even the tiniest invariance in sound, giving it an aura and sketching out an inner polyphony, in its densest, knottiest heart.
From this point, the composer asks herself how to transcend the oppositions between Self and Other, to move between what is familiar and what is foreign. The Navigator responds with desire and love; with Eros, the primordial divinity, who incarnates duality. “I am two souls in myself,” wrote Sappho, who is cited in the work. Another of the poet’s fragments (R. 182) describes Eros as a “weaver of tales (muthoplokon) – or a “weaver of fictions,” according to the Prelude’s subtitle. Lim also discovers another phrase by Sappho in a book by Anne Carson: Eros, the Bittersweet (R. 97-98). Sung by The Navigator at the end of Scene 2, the words point to the ambivalence, the tugging at the senses, and the illusion that conditions the erotic. Through his mother, Pénia (Poverty), the god watches an unreachable horizon, because touching it, closing that distance, would signify that the horizon – the desire – would cease to be; through his father, Poros (Resourcefulness or Expediency, although poros can also mean a river or sea bed, a path, a way, a passage) is always traveling, traversing seas and expanses of sand. Greek cosmogonies teach us that Eros, the underlying force that assures the propagation of the species and the internal cohesion of the Cosmos, was born from the primeval Egg, engendered by the Night, and that his two halves, split apart, formed the Land and the Sky, enriching the themes of fertility and childbearing, which are another feature of Lim’s work. In the introductory notes to The Heart’s Ear (1997), Lim mentions a Rûmî poem describing how birdsong begins in the egg (a song about the very act of being born); The Quickening (2004-2005) describes the first time a mother feels her infant moving in her belly, as well as other kinds of birthing: lives, ideas, sap circulating in trees. A final example: the last scene in The Navigator describes a dream in the womb, during which, in a ritual of rebirth, a cicada is placed on the eyes of a fetus.
The organic and the natural are core themes in Lim’s work, from her first piece, Garden of Earthly Desire (1988-1989), all the way through to The Navigator where, very explicitly, the electronics distort recordings of cicadas6, and in her most recent pieces. Citing the philosopher Elizabeth Grosz, Liza Lim explains, in an article titled “Patterns of Ecstasy” that art is not so much about human creativity as it is about nature, earth’s ability to make superabundance for the senses – the singing and dancing of birds, lilacs rustling in the wind. A bird does not sing about anything, but it intensifies our perception of a given moment, in a given place and its surroundings, a testament to the epiphanic quality of aesthetic experience. In this context, the cycle of seasons sings out in In the Shadow’s Light (2004), for string quartet; this cycle appears in The Quickening through metaphors of voyages through death and life, as well as in The Four Seasons (after Cy Twombly) (2009), for piano; here, as “climates” and “seasons” of an inner life.
Another dimension of Liza Lim’s work must be discussed here: her attention to language and to writing. Composed for coloratura soprano and fifteen instruments, Li Shang Yin (1993), the name of a 9th-century poet, is inspired by Chinese ideograms, which complete “meaning” in an analogical, more than a discursive form7. And if the grammar of a language orients one’s understanding of the identity for which it is the vehicle, Lim analyzes the way in which the form of Chinese verbs does not vary according to the subject. This grammatical singularity is the focus of the libretto of Yuè Lìng Jié (1999). Here, it is instructive to examine the idea of native language, which the composer evokes in the very title of Mother Tongue (2005), for soprano and fifteen instruments, along with early childhood and the intimate tonalities of a child’s first words, as well as the intonations one finds at the moment of death, and even the disappearance of language, which is inextricably bound to the loss of homeland. Words are broken down into abstract entities, allowing them to react at an equal level with the elements: water, droplets, waves, earth, dust, etc. Voodoo Child (1989), for soprano and seven instruments, after a Sappho poem, also tends toward this breakdown of language; the work pushes toward an analogy, a transposition, or even a translation of the guessed-at sounds of Ancient Greek. Sappho’s verses, which enunciate love, dampness, and honey, “hot and cold sensations prickling under the skin” (in Lim’s words), uncontrollable trembling, rendering the tongue unable to speak - this creates a score with flexible textures, where transformations of vowels, modulations of the throat and mouth cavity, and harmonic modifications inspired by Mongolian chanting respond to strings bowed near the bridge, to the harmonics and song of wind instruments, to cymbals, to timbales and percussions acting as frequency generators.
The theme of language introduces the idea of ceaseless rewriting and the demanding nature of myth and mythology. “Myths are incredible storehouses of deep cultural knowledge so I find them endlessly fascinating, relevant and alive8”. Already in The Oresteia (1991-1993), a “memory theater”, fruit of a collaboration between Lim, the director Barrie Kosky, and the choreographer Shelley Lasica, the composer worked with material from Ancient Greece: the drama of the Trojan War, the murder of Agamemnon, Orestes and the matricide, and the prophetess Cassandra. The result is “a story of unappeased possession” based on Aeschylus’s Oresteia, a drama by Tony Harrison, and poems of Sappho9. The Navigator is also packed with mythological references: the archipelago obviously recalls Homer’s Odyssey; the ghostly presence of the Mahabharata can be felt; and Scene 3 alludes to an episode in the Breton folk version of Tristan and Isolde10. The concrete elements of the plot are less important than the oblique lines of force around the themes of metamorphosis and risk. If the game of love is always a return to a game already played, desire and rewriting set the The Navigator in a mythical temporality, that of suspension in ravishing, to the point of devouring the other (Scene 2) or that of eternal return, the alternation of love and war, creation and destruction, opening and closing – resembling the valves of the heart with which the opera closes.
However, Liza Lim’s art draws on ritual more than it does on myth, in that it shatters narration, but above all in that it builds a space in which invisible forces or phenomena become manifest. “In my formation as a composer, I notice that I have sought out cultural places and practices that arise from epistemological views or ‘ways of knowing’ that recognise a deep interrelationship between realms of the visible and the invisible11”. In this, Australian Aboriginal teachings have been pivotal for her, with their dialectical relationship between the visible and the invisible. This dialectic is a paradigm that structures meaning. A smooth surface where the eye perceives nothing is not necessarily atonal, static – it may be full of turbulence and moving forces, at another depth. The tiniest opening and that tension is revealed. In an interview with Véronique Brindeau, Lim explained that her thinking about instruments is influenced by her own cultural roots: in Chinese culture, ritual objects, particularly funerary objects, are made to look exactly like those used by the living, but with deliberate imperfections worked into them, which are, in fact, the appropriate way to make offerings to the spirits12. “Shimmering” (bir’yun) in the visual art of the Yolngu, who inhabit north-eastern Arnhem Land in Northern Territory Australia, has also attracted Lim’s attention. As Tim Rutherford-Johnson has written, “This technique projects a shimmering brightness that is seen as emanating from the ancestral creators of Yolngu mythology: bir’yun thus endows the paintings themselves with ancestral power. The shimmer of a painting is not only read as a representation of that power, but is also felt as a direct manifestation of it. That power is regarded as dangerous and is a highly-restricted form of knowledge[…]13”. In other Aboriginal cultures, rituals are undertaken by healers who move through dreaming to hunt and capture songs, dances, and ceremonial markings on bodies, as well as other patterns. It is said that they recognize these forms by their shimmer, a light-like or aura-like quality that both hides and occludes the presence of a spiritual reality. Songs heard in dreaming are described in the kukatja language, for example, as the shimmering of a waterfall. An event’s intensity is measured in this way, its life-vibration, the life-source that is water in a desert land. This idea of shimmering appears in many of Lim’s works, notably in Shimmer Songs (2006) for harp, three percussions, and string quartet; In the Shadow’s Light (2004); and The Quickening. Homorhythmic illusions, the granulated sounds of a rain stick, or, as we have seen, of a guiro bow, and other bouncing bow strokes… Everything here expresses the abandonment of the continuum and discontinuous ecstasy.
Do you notice a mistake?