The Carol of the Two Crows: Performed Sunday 11 December

O N S U N D A Y, 11 December 2022, the Australian Chamber Choir gives the world premiere performance of “The Carol of the Two Crows,” a setting by Alan Holley of one of nine new carols I’ve written for him.

If you’re in Melbourne, get along this Sunday to Ceremony of Carols, in which this new work stands beside some other contemporary Australian works and some ancient sacred classics: 3pm Sunday 11 December 2022, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Middle Park (Boonwurrung), Melbourne/Naam.

Or book here to livestream: https://access.auschoir.org/#/item/81066

See my poem below. Here ‘s what the ACC’s Elizabeth Anderson says about Alan’s work:

This new work has been in the pipeline for a long time. You may recall me telling you that Alan was writing a new work for the ACC's Baroque Christmas program, which we were to perform at the Art Gallery of NSW in December 2021. But that concert was cancelled due to COVID and we agreed to instead perform Alan's new carol in our 2022 Christmas program. We are grateful to have had a year of uninterrupted concerts in 2022, which included a performance of our Secret Chamber program at the Art Gallery of NSW in May. Ceremony of Carols is our last concert for the year, and yes, it does include the long-awaited new work!

During recent decades, Alan Holley’s works have been heard at numerous music festivals (sometimes in concerts wholly devoted to these works) in Croatia, Serbia, and Albania, as well as Australia. Among his most ambitious pieces is a trumpet concerto called Doppler’s Web, which the Sydney Symphony Orchestra commissioned in 2005 for performance by the orchestra’s principal trumpeter, Paul Goodchild. The ACC performed his Time Passages (also a setting of Mark Tredinnick’s poetry) in seventeen concerts in Australia, Belgium, Denmark and Germany in 2019. Alan’s output is published by Kookaburra Music and available on disc via the Hammerings Records label. 

Alan explains the influences behind Two Crows:

"For more than forty years I have been notating the songs of a small number of birds who live near my house on the northern beaches of Sydney. The tawny frogmouth has been prominent, and the grey butcherbird, with its clarinet-toned purity of song. I write down the melodies as if I am composing diary entries, and I can see small variations over the years and, indeed, decades. When I include these calls in my compositions, it’s not to create some sort of ornithological songfest – although that has happened a few times; I write the phrases of the birds into my music because these small musical components have become the folksongs of my life.
 
Although most people may not think that the Australian raven has a beautiful call, it is one I find totally intriguing, and when there is a congregation of crows all screaming at full volume, there are so many dissonances created and great rhythmic complexity. In the Carol of the Two Crows, I hint at some crow-like song without resorting to an exact call.
 
Mark Tredinnick’s poem is made of nine lines, each line of nine syllables. The rhythm of these lines, in tension with the rhythm of the syntax that runs through the lines, led me to create moments of alternating time signatures. These help me bounce the musical and lexical ideas off each other – the way the music and the sense dance in Mark’s lines. I wanted to treat the text the way I know that Mark composed it, as folksongs for these times – given to us by birds".
 
Here’s what I say about my poem.

"I can’t think why it took me so long to work out how to write contemporary carols – carols that nod toward the ideas in the Bible stories of the Nativity (rebirth, hope against hope, joy in the despair, and the triumph of life) without being narrowly Christian; carols that are spiritual but not pious, reverent without slipping into dogma or the sentiment of Yuletide. Birds carolled long before humans did; the verb was theirs long before it was ours, and long before it was overwhelmed by Christmas. Some people claim it was the birds who taught us to talk and at length to sing. So, when Alan asked me for some carols to set for this great choir, at length I landed on the birds.
 
This is one of nine carols I’ve composed, the nine comprising a poem of a type known inelegantly only as a ‘9 x 9 x 9.’ And I’ve drawn, in the writing, on a life of listening to the birds, witnessing them as well as I could, wherever I have travelled.  My observation of the birds is an amateur’s. Whatever love is, poetry does that, I once wrote. I think love’s what the birds sing, and most of what they teach".
 

Carol of the Two Crows

When I walked out, knee-deep in Advent,

    To check who kept rolling what down my

Tin roof, they stopped it, but I knew: two

         Crows stood side by side on the ridge cap,

Mischief aforethought bright in their eyes.

    And when I walked in, it started straight

Up: a bone they’d burgled from the dogs

  Came clattering down again. So, play

Your days; give praise for the wit of birds.
 

Click here to read more program notes. Be among the first people to hear this light-hearted poem set to music by Alan Holley, when you livestream Ceremony of Carols at 3PM on Sunday 11 December.