Ross EDWARDS (1943)
Pacific

Ross Edwards was born in Sydney in 1943. After extensive study in Australia and Europe - his teachers included Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, Peter Maxwell Davies and Sándor Veress - he held teaching positions at the University of Sydney and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. How now works full-time as a composer. He was the Australian Council's Don Banks Fellow in 1989 and has twice been awarded the Australia Creative Artists Fellowship. His Symphony Da Pacem Domine received the 1993 APRA Music Award for Contemporary Classical Composition of the Year, and an Aria Award winning ABC Classics CD of his orchestral music played by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra has been internationally acclaimed and voted Editor's Choice at the 1996 Cannes Classical Awards.

Edwards' commitment to the ideal of music as a positive and regenerative force within society has led him to explore beyond the boundaries of Western Art Music. His output falls naturally into two groups. The first, known as the sacred series, is characterised by a timeless, crystalline austerity, and the individual works (e.g., The Tower of Remoteness and Yarrageh - Nocturne for solo percussion and orchestra) have been described as musical contemplation objects. Edwards claims to have distilled the elements of his highly personal language from the natural environment of Australia's eastern seaboard, and the textures of his music reflect his fascination with the sounds of insects, frogs and birds.

In distinct contrast to the sacred series are the maninya (dance-chant) pieces, of which the violin concerto, Maninyas, is perhaps the best known. Designed for vivid communication, they represent an immediately attractive surface to the listener: buoyant rhythms and cross rhythms (often influenced by patterns in nature), drone-like harmonies, joyfully obsessive melodic interplay using a variety of pentatonic scales (Indonesian, Japanese, Celtic, etc.) as well as mediaeval European modes, bright colours and generally lively tempi. These works, which reflect and celebrate Australia's cultural diversity, have a deeply serious purpose: to promote levity, spontaneity and corporeality and to allow these fundamental musical impulses, relegated to a subsidiary role in the Western Symphonic tradition and its aftermath, to reassert themselves and generate their own forms.