Liza Lim
Program Notes by Lara Pellegrinelli
Lara Pellegrinelli is a scholar and a journalist, who contributes to NPR and The New York Times. She has been the commissioned writer for Miller Theatre’s Composer Portraits series since 2018.
Composer Liza Lim, the inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium, spent the last academic year on a prestigious fellowship among forty scholars and artists at the Wissenschaftskolleg of Berlin. There she continued to explore the connections that have occasioned much of her recent work: the relationship between music and ecological thinking, the role of artistic practice during a time of global emergencies, and the narratives that humans create to make sense of these material realities.
In other words, Lim is driven by questions of how composition might prove useful in navigating the challenges of the Anthropocene, although some of her activities during this European sojourn were arguably slightly less lofty. She also experimented with rope tricks.
“There are many classic magic tricks involving rope,” Lim explains as a prelude for discussing String Creatures, which will have its U.S. premiere by the JACK Quartet this evening. “The reason why they’re classic is because we understand inside our bodies what a rope is and what it does. When it doesn’t do what you think it should do, you’re a kid again.”
During the pandemic, Lim faced setbacks familiar to grownups everywhere, including the cancellation and indefinite postponement of projects, while she taught disembodied students and administered a gender equity project for composers over Zoom. Unlike the United States, Australia enforced a strict initial lockdown for nearly four months in 2020 and briefer “snap lockdowns” as outbreaks emerged throughout 2021; there were zero deaths recorded between late October 2020 and April 2021. Lim’s fellowship not only released her from her university duties, but she arrived in a completely different social reality than what she had left behind: a city fully open for in-person gatherings like concerts.
From Berlin, she was able to see many delayed projects come to fruition. Last October, the Luxembourg Philharmonic Orchestra premiered Lim’s World as Lover, World as Self (2021), a piano concerto inspired by Buddhist eco-philosopher Joanna Macy. In April, the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne became the first ensemble to perform Lim’s hefty Annunciation Tryptich (2019-22) in its entirety: “Sappho/Bioluminescence,” “Mary/Transcendence After Trauma,” and “Fatimah/Jubilation of Flowers” for soprano, orchestra, and singing audience (recorded for later release on Kairos).
Daily lunches, readings, lectures, and symposia at the Wissenshaftskolleg effectively brought Lim out of isolation. Her own colloquium with Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist had her colleagues on their feet, practicing a Nordic folk dance with a hesitating second step that fueled the creation of One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin) for solo violin with low octave string (2022). Later in the year, Lim reunited with French cellist Séverine Ballon, a frequent collaborator and member of Australia’s Ensemble Elision, for a lecture/demonstration. Lim used the platform to discuss an aesthetics of shimmer, drawn from Indigenous Australian Yolngu culture.
“Because of these years of absence,” Lim says of the pandemic, “collaborations have taken on another sort of power, which I experienced very strongly in Berlin. I have a heightened appreciation for the encounter and what it can do. A musical term for this kind of return would be ‘refrain.’ And the power of the refrain is this sense of arrival, renewal, and recognition. It cannot be static because one is already a different person by the time you arrive at these points.”
“Because of these years of absence . . . collaborations have taken on another sort of power . . . A musical term for this kind of return would be ‘refrain.’ And the power of the refrain is this sense of arrival, renewal, and recognition.”
Lim’s encounter with JACK during their Berlin workshop for String Creatures was full of that heightened appreciation and power—perhaps because it literally tied the group together.
“She threw a rope around John [Pickford Richard]’s hands and had me tie his wrists to the neck of his viola,” remembers cellist Jay Campbell. “I researched different bondage knots to do that. Liza asked him to free himself, and, as he was wiggling out of the rope, his bow made these scratching types of sounds.”
“She had [second violinist] Austin [Wulliman] trying to learn a magic rope trick,” adds John Pickford Richards. “You line up three pieces of rope and the ends have magnets. With sleight of hand, it should look like three ropes suddenly become one.”
Rope, or rather string more broadly, is one of the oldest human technologies and has metaphorical resonance across cultures.
“I am drawn to the animacy of [rope] . . . You cannot completely control its behavior. It may snap at any moment, which reminds you of time and the thread of life that keeps spinning out”
“It’s a magical substance,” Lim says. “I’m drawn to the animacy of it. There’s the tension of string and the friction of string; its fragility, and its strength. You cannot completely control its behavior. It may snap at any moment, which reminds you of time and the thread of life that keeps spinning out. We bind and unbind. We weave our understandings.”
The violin was Lim’s instrument while she was growing up. Although she was born in Australia, her parents had emigrated from Brunei to Melbourne. They moved the family back to Brunei when Lim was around seven years old. One by one, they sent their three daughters to boarding school in Melbourne at the Presbyterian Ladies College, a place Lim describes as having a “strong feminist ethos.” Contemporary masters including Penderecki, Berio, Ligeti, and Cage were part of the curriculum. Lim was encouraged not only to play music but to compose, starting with graphic scores.
“I was lucky to be in an environment where one experimented with instruments,” she remembers. “You could prepare an instrument, detune it, whatever you wanted. There was no distinction between, Oh, here’s a sound that’s allowed. And here’s a sound that isn’t.”
She earned her undergraduate degree in violin—there was no composition major—at Victorian College of the Arts. There she met the future members of Elision Ensemble, who would become Australia’s pre-eminent new music group and her most significant collaborators, relationships that have now lasted more than three decades. Lim continued her formal studies at the University of Melbourne (M.A. 1996) and the University of Queensland (Ph.D. 2001). Her principal teachers were Riccardo Formosa, an accomplished popular musician and student of Milanese composer Franco Donatoni, and Richard David Hames.
From the beginning of her career, Lim was ambitious about both the scope and scale of what she created. She wrote her first opera Orestia (1993), a “memory theater” in which the characters of the Greek trilogy recommence their feud, at the age of 27. Full orchestral works and multi-evening performance pieces with coordinating installations would follow. Yet Lim did not espouse a particular compositional orthodoxy.
“I was a sponge and grateful for all that I encountered,” she remembers. “I was fascinated by Brian Ferneyhough’s work and had already spent time with his scores when I was a teenager. Then I worked with Riccardo Formosa on Italianate craft. I definitely grappled with that super-detailed, technical, high modernist language, but the other important aspect of European music was sound—sonic exploration.”
Yet another factor was at play in the formation of Lim’s compositional voice: her identity as an Asian Australian woman only a generation removed from immigration. She grew up with Malay musics at home in the 1970s, when the Asian experience was one of invisibility. “So that one isn’t a target,” she says. “My parents’ generation was afraid of any kind of political visibility because that put you in danger.” At the same time, Australian musical culture was seeing a wave of nationalism that rejected its European ancestry in favor of Eastern and Indigenous influences (with materials and methods arguably appropriated by white Australians). Composer Peter Sculthorpe, for whom Lim’s professorship is named, was the leader in a generation invested in this type of multiculturalism, making Lim’s academic appointment in his name politically significant.
Critics have written about her work in terms of its “blending” and integration” of non-Western elements, terms that center an Anglo-European perspective and its notions of purity.
“It’s not a project of integration—it’s where you already are,” she says.
“For example, I grew up speaking village dialect. My mother’s side is Hainanese. My father’s side is Hokkien, though they were already removed from where those languages came from. People in my community in Brunei spoke a mix of Chinese, Malay, and English—English is an Asian language as well. This is very important to recognize. It’s used as a dialect, but it’s a language, right? To say something is a dialect is to create hierarchy. But if you say the dialect is your language, that a mixed-up, creolized culture is your culture rather something lesser-than, it takes you into another space.”
If Lim’s works offer a more visceral take on technically precise, high modernist musical ideals, it is perhaps because of the ways that her experimentalist leanings overlap with her multivalent cultural identity. Together, they ground her work in tactile, embodied experiences situated in the environment, ones that extend to her explorations with string.
After a break following the birth of her son, Lim’s career gathered new momentum. She composed Ecstatic Architecture (2004) for the Los Angeles Philharmonic to be performed in its then-new, Frank Gehry-designed concert hall. From 2005-2006, she was the resident composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. And in 2007, her Flying Banner (After Wang To) won the Orchestral Work of the Year from the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA).
At the time, Lim was living in Brisbane. Through neighbors, she had become involved with Indigenous communities. A trip to Yirrkala, on Australia’s remote northern coast in East Arnhem Land, had a profound impact, causing a conceptual shift from a “horizontal construction of Chinese knowledge – with its cosmologies, writing systems, poetry, and other cultural forms – to a much more vertical idea of structure made up of different layers of transparency, viscosity, opacity,” she told Rosalind Appleby in Women of Note: The Rise of Australian Women Composers. “Shimmer, an effect of flickering light or a pulsing aural quality, has an absolutely central value across Australia and [Indigenous] cultures as an indicator of the presence of a spiritual reality. The aesthetic quality of a shimmer (whether found on a canvas painting, a body painting, or the beating of clap sticks) is associated with the creative transformation of matter and a tangible connection to ancestral time.”
String instruments became essential in Lim’s attempts to manifest these qualities musically and can be heard in a series of compositions: In the shadow’s light (2004) for string quartet; Songs found in dream (2005) for oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, trumpet, two percussionists, cello, and double bass; Shimmer Songs (2006) for string quartet, harp, and three percussionists; The Compass (2006) for orchestra with flute and didjeridu soloists; and Ochred String (2008) for a quartet of oboe, viola, cello, and double bass.
Invisibility (2009) for solo cello, composed for Séverine Ballon (and performed as part of Lim’s lecture/demonstration at the Wissenshaftskolleg), was central to these experiments. In the work, Lim employs a “güiro bow,” an alternative bow construction in which the horsehair is wrapped tightly around the wood in a spiral. “It creates a three-dimensional quality because every stroke has a kind of granulation on top,” she says. “It’s like there’s a hidden object. And then there are these oscillating surfaces.”
Weaver’s Knot (2013-14), written for the 40th anniversary of the Arditti Quartet and played by JACK at Spoleto in 2018, thus beginning their relationship with Lim, takes those experiments in another direction. The so-called “weaver’s knot,” found in fishing nets from neolithic times, has remained an essential technique in fabric production. “It’s a knot that uses tension to hold it in place yet is also reversible, so it can be undone,” writes Lim in her composer’s note. “The musical work offers an image of the string quartet as an ensemble of dynamic sonic threads in an unfolding process of binding and unbinding. Individual lines follow different pathways coming together to create emergent patterns or knots in which tension is accumulated and held or released.”
The two pieces on tonight’s program extend Lim’s body of work with string, an inexhaustible resource that forms new connections between performers organically, through its own distributed networks and transformative potential.
an ocean beyond earth (2016) is scored for solo cello prepared with violin and thread, making it, in essence, a duo for a solo performer.
The cellist sits across from a violin secured on a stand. Each string is tied to the corresponding string on the instrument opposite it, creating an installation of long, parallel threads. Using a hand powdered with rosin, the player reaches out to grip a thread between their thumb and first finger. The tension and the friction caused by the hand tracing these lines back and forth produces vibrations that sound each instrument in turn.
“There is a magical quality to the movement,” explains Jay Campbell. “Depending on how far away the violin is, I might not be able to see the thread. It looks like I’m pulling sound out of the violin with my hand.”
The technique is like one Lim observed in Latcho Drom (1993), a French film that uses music to tell the story of the centuries-long Romani migration. Instead of bowing, fiddler Nicolae Neacșu (1924–2002) of Taraf de Haïdouks plays a raspy melody using a horsehair tied to the G-string of his instrument, a technique referred to as la fir de păr (“hair without bow”).
But the idea to use additional threads in an ocean beyond earth was one with a personal connection to Séverine Ballon, for whom the piece was written.
“Severine sews and she always has thread in her pocket,” Lim shares. “She makes all of her own clothes. That’s super intimate, isn’t it? It became a little portrait of the player.”
“...the JACK Quartet enables me to take a speculative approach to composition. They are most able collaborators in this sense. They’re a quartet that is willing to go anywhere.”
String Creatures, co-commissioned for the JACK Quartet by Miller Theatre, the Lucerne Festival, and the Melbourne Recital Centre, grew from the ensemble’s collaborations with Lim in Berlin. Although rope tricks did not become part of the final composition, what Lim and the musicians discovered through play created techniques that do inhabit the piece.
“The music tracks paths guided by the materiality of the instruments and bodies involved,” writes Lim in a post on her website, “and it builds form by exploring the relational possibilities of string as a substance—entangling, knotting, weaving…and finally nest-making.”
The materiality of the instruments may not produce exactly the sounds we expect because of the substitution of a low octave string for the first violin’s G String, as in One and the Other (Speculative Polskas for Karin). “It’s a violin making a sound that it shouldn’t be able to make,” Campbell says. “It’s not aligned with the identity of the violin as we tend to think of it, so it feels disembodied and otherworldly.”
“Cat’s Cradle,” the first of three movements, is subtitled “3 diagrams of grief.” The pandemic gave Lim ample time to consider this emotional state. “Grief is a groove,” she says. “It is worn down—carved through repetition. It’s in the physicality of repetitive movement.”
The first sounds are produced by a repeated gesture that Lim refers to as a “chop,” a technique introduced into fiddle playing by Richard Greene of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys in the 1960s. JACK’s players engage in this percussive action, digging into their strings. The sounds shift to those of lamentation for the second diagram, then realign and coalesce into something of a lullaby in the third.
In “Untethered,” the second and longest movement, repeated figures sound simultaneously but gradually at different rates, becoming entwined in the changing flow of time. The movement also contains the fruits of the magic rope tricks. “In a solo passage, [first violinist] Chris [Otto] gets into the position of having his wrists tied to the neck and is stuck there,” says Richards. “It sounds exactly like he is trying to get out of a rope.”
Lastly, “a nest is woven from the inside out,’ has its roots in an article from The New York Times Magazine, “Why Birds are the World’s Best Engineers,” followed by conversations with Mark Hauber, an ornithologist from the University of Illinois who was also a fellow at the Wissenshaftskolleg.
“Rather than necessarily weaving their nests,” Lim explains on her website, “birds pile up twigs and grasses and then rub against these with their bodies until individual filaments start to behave collectively, jamming together to make the nest. The chaotic ‘stick bomb’ of a nest retains just enough energy from the bird’s activity for the whole ensemble to maintain its shape.” The physical movements of the musicians, who brush and sweep with their bows, recreate this mechanical synthesis.
Watch: In conversation with music journalist Martina Seeber, Liza Lim discusses String Creatures
“Liza is good at finding the weird little nooks and crannies of our instruments,” Campbell says. “Sometimes a sound winds up in a piece because of the unusual - or even ludicrous - way we were playing our instruments in a workshop— and then we have to perform it. Which means accessing a mental zone that’s almost theatrical, where we’re willing to go over the top even if it feels silly because that’s where the most interesting sounds happen.”
“I don’t know that the work is necessarily playful,” Lim reflects, “but it has real rhythmic momentum, and they go for it. There’s an enormous matter of relish in what they do. Like other performers I’ve worked with for a much longer time, the JACK Quartet enables me to take a speculative approach to composition. They are most able collaborators in this sense. They’re a quartet that is willing to go anywhere.”