I’ve known the singular Australian composer Liza Lim for about fifteen years, and written about her music on many occasions, culminating in a book, The Music of Liza Lim, published last year for Wildbird Press. Two things that I’ve come to associate with her music are the strength and consistency of her compositional voice – there really is no one who writes music like she does – and, simultaneously, her limitless capacity for surprise and reinvention.
At Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival last November, I had the great pleasure of conducting a public Q&A with Liza, ahead of the UK premiere of her Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time, performed by the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and gestural performer Winnie Huang. This article is based on a transcript of that conversation, as well as some wider reflections on Liza and her piece.
Between 2020 and 2022, when I was writing my book, I think I can have had some claim to know as much about her music and of what it was capable as almost anyone. But even in that two-year period she wrong-footed me several times, whether by incorporating sonically triggered “altars” of objects and offerings into her forty-five-minute bass flute solo Sex Magic; or writing a piano concerto, World as Lover, World as Self, whose third movement is based around the nursery rhyme “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (the tune a reference to the Australian-born girl Tharnicaa Murugappan, whose refugee family was held in detention by the Australian government for three years). Perhaps most surprising of all was her engagement with 19th-century symphonic tradition in the orchestral Annunciation Triptych. Each one of these left-turns required a hasty rewrite.
One thing these examples have in common with each other, and with the rest of Lim’s music, is how they begin from a consideration of who and what will be in the room when they are played, and how those things can be illuminated and utilised in the piece – whether that is Claire Chase’s bass flute Bertha, pianist Tamara Stefanovich’s voice, or the sonic archive that is a symphony orchestra. With Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time, Lim introduces something entirely new into the room: a river, and more particularly the Eigenthal-Rümlig in Lucerne, which runs close to the location of the Lucerne Festival, where her piece was premiered a few days before it came to Huddersfield.
“A river allows us to think about time”, Lim says, when I ask why she felt she had to bring it into her piece. “I think of it as being very neurologically ancient, in us – the river, in our cultural DNA, in our language. Words like current, currency, stream, streaming, you can go on and on. You can see how embedded the river is, and the motions of the water, in the way in which we understand the world, and what the flow of energy is.”
Lim incorporates the Eigenthal-Rümlig in many ways. There are sound recordings, of course, which are replayed alongside the live orchestral music. These are triggered and controlled by Huang, who wears a Genki Wave Ring, a commercially available instrument that can map different MIDI control parameters, such as volume, pitch and playback speed, to different hand movements. Then there are videos of the river, filmed in different locations: within the stream, around it, and far above it from a drone. And finally there are the sounds of the violin, dipped into the water. This is one of the most striking ideas within the piece – a perfect example of Lim’s ability to expand the possibilities of her music in surprising ways. Where did the idea come from?
“The sound artist Bennett Hogg, from Newcastle, has done work along these lines. If you imagine dipping the neck of a violin into water, the current of the water is strong enough to actually bow the strings. It creates this amazing aquatic aeolian effect”, Lim says. “He also collaborated with a Swedish guitarist called Stefan Östersjö, with aeolian guitars… But the reason for the violin was the presence of Winnie Huang: she’s a violinist, so it made sense that this instrument, which is an extension of her practice, would be part of it. There’s something very touching seeing this cultural object, this instrument, being placed in this environment, and being the kind of interface for this communication. And then in the piece itself, we see films of Winnie in the river, triggered by Winnie on stage, while she is also manipulating and sculpting the sound live. These movements are really very intuitive for her, in terms of the impact on the sound.”
Certainly, for those who saw the work that evening this was one of its most effective elements. (Multispecies Knots was recently broadcast by the BBC, but without the visual element it is a very different piece.) Huang stood on a raised platform at the back of the ensemble and directly in front of one of two video screens onto which film of the river was projected. Her position made it clear that not only was she a soloist – of a sort – but also that she was playing in correspondence with the river: at times she appeared almost completely immersed in it, her movements carving and flowing like those of an aquatic creature. The sense that the river’s role within the piece is collaborative (rather than exploitative) is important.
“A river is a living being”, Lim explains. In recent years, rivers in Ecuador, Colombia and Bangladesh have been granted legal personhood in response to campaigns by Indigenous peoples to protect their status not only as natural resources but as kin. The first was the Whanganui on the North Island of New Zealand, which was granted legal personhood in 2017 in a formal acknowledgement of the Māori saying: “I am the river and the river is me”.
“This really changes how one might connect to, relate to, and so on to rivers”, Lim continues. “This notion of reverence, care, attention has to be the basis of the practice. One thing that was very important for me, working with the Rümlig, was before we began filming there, we should make a ritual address to the river. We introduced ourselves, we asked permission to work there, and asked for protection and blessing, and made offerings. I spoke in English, and the Lucerne team – the artistic director of the Lucerne Festival Forward, Felix Heri – spoke in Swiss German.
“This is very important: for indigenous people everywhere, this aspect of the language of the place, is central. And it totally made sense: Swiss German is incredibly melodious, and being there with this melodious river, it just totally clicked.” Approaching the river with respect appears to have paid off: filming took place in June, and although it rained almost every day that month, Lim and her team were gifted one “gorgeous, glorious day of seamless work” in which they were able to complete all their filming. “And then at the end of the day as we packed up, it began to rain. I like to think that we were in a very protected space.”
The river, then, was granted agency and personhood both within Lim’s creative process and in the finished piece. This idea of respecting the personhood of more-than-human objects has long been a factor in how she works (beginning with instruments themselves: note how many musicians, like Chase, give names to their instruments). And extending that to a river is just a continuation of this idea.
In addition to personhood, Lim has been developing notions of non-human sentiency in recent works. “I’m still exploring it”, she says, adding that it is already revealing new kinds of musical experience. Only a few days before, in rehearsals with the Lucerne orchestra, “we were talking about rivers, and there was still this feeling of: we’re trying to describe something about the river. I think what was a huge shift was to say: the river’s not out there, the river’s inside us. It’s a whole living system, the river is not just the water, it’s the air, it’s everything – these things are deeply alive.” This line of thought precipitated a change in how the orchestra approached the music itself – right in the very last hour of the last rehearsal: “There was a sudden shift where we began to say, as a group: oh, the music is alive, music is living in our mouths as we play, inside our fingers, the notation is living. It was this extraordinary moment.”
Over three decades of composing, Lim has created many extraordinary moments, but I had never heard her talk about music itself as alive, as sentient before. It is a powerful thought – to think of music and musician aligning, like fish in the flow of a river, each making and performing the other. “That’s what I’m interested in, in composing”, she concludes. “To open up these spaces in which there are these emergent effects. You don’t necessarily know beforehand everything about what will arise. Something special happens because of that, that I didn’t make deliberately.”
Liza Lim’s Calling the Ancestral River will be premiered by Elision Ensemble & Karin Hellqvist (violin) at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, 8th August
