Walking Inside the Score

It is a habit of mine when in a new place to try to connect with the landscape. I do this as introduction; it is a way for me to extend respect and helps me listen deeply to the voice of the land. Most times of course, in modern cities, the natural elements- foreshores or greenspaces, lakes or rivers are highly sculpted. They often arise as a response to the trampling of country's original spirit, a manicured remaking, a manageable patch, of what once was. I know this well but believe I can listen past or through the contemporary composition to hear strands of the original. I had this in mind when I walked from my hotel to Toronto's inner harbour waterfrontage. I wanted to visit the Toronto Music Garden. Having brushed past it in my scrolling for things to do I thought the walk would help me feel the land beneath me. It would take me towards water and what I mistakenly thought were musical installations that could be played and interacted with.

Scanning the amber leaves of the surround birch and maple trees it took me a while to realise where the garden actually was. There was no steel to hit, no pipes to blow, only winding or meandering or meditative pathways between beds of waving grasses, blooming and dying blooms, rocks and grassed amphitheatres. When I noticed a sign it all became clear. The landscape was shaped to reflect each dance movement within Bach's First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, each section of garden corresponding to a suite within, the concept was designed by Yo Yo Ma. 

Of course, I managed to enter at the music's middle then continue backwards, a fitting analogy for a First Nations composer. I often find myself disoriented amongst western traditions of score, notation and form. I found a way nonetheless to move through the experience, one lead by eye, then smell then eventually thought. The gardens were teeming with life, implanted and residual. Butterflies burst from tall flowers, birds dove amongst the undergrowth, an enormous willow danced in the harbour's cool breeze. A sign told me in that section of garden the birch trees were spaced to reflect the bar lines of that point in the music. When black squirrel darted from the bark of one of those trees I imagined note heads lifting and scurrying through the score. It had the effect of making me feel I was walking inside the piece and that it was being created around me. As I moved onward I smelled the lavender and rosemary and I noticed small and large performance spaces within the walking, growing, shifting work - small spaces for poetry, open clearings for dance, and a wide amphitheatre perfect for larger musical and theatrical works. It was glorious to feel I was walking inside a creation that creation herself was playing hostess to. It was euphoric to feel that same creation holding places for the work of others. I decided I wanted to make work just like it. To pursue art that provided organic material and space for the making of others. I also knew I wanted to walk inside of music, have song bursting with smell and touch and tasted and sight as well as sound. I wanted to walk inside a composition the way Yo Yo Ma and Toronto was showing me to. But of course, I already do. The whole of Australia is songline.

I have only recently returned from doing my own version of this very act. Searching for a song recorded on gramophone by Euahlayi man Booligar Jack, I drove to northern Queensland following slivers of information I have uncovered about his life, moving though stations, towns and rivers I know him to have been. All the time though, during that journey, I was searching for something. I failed to realise I was walking his garden. It took a journey to the other side of the world, a writers festival, a cellist and composition informed by dance written by Bach to realise I would have been better served enjoying the creation around me if I wanted to find his song. That Old Man is laughing at the effort it takes to get me thinking in right and strong ways. But it only takes a few masters of a very few things plus meandering journeys through different creations to get me where I need to be.