I feel Ann’s presence while reading her handwritten score, sensing her hands beneath my hands (knowing that she would have played these pieces), listening to the resonances she chose. Sharing from ear to ear inner landscapes. Following the path of her row through its forest of shifting colours. Knowing that what she would have heard would never really be fixed; the resonances/vibrations always alive and shifting. The intimacy of sound entering the body through air. Music stitching together time, its tiny gestures part of an immeasurable canvas. — EVE EGOYAN

Isn’t that life, in a way: trying to accommodate dissonance? — ANN SOUTHAM

THE MANUSCRIPT

The five pieces on this disc are an unexpected gift. They were discovered in Ann Southam’s house following the composer’s death in November 2010, along with several pages of sketch material for similar pieces. They are close siblings of Returnings and Returnings II: A Meditation, the hauntingly serene, and serenely haunting, pieces that stand as Southam’s final works, and which Eve Egoyan recorded in 2011 on Returnings: Music of Ann Southam (Centrediscs CMCCD 17211).

The quantity of Returnings-style pieces is not in itself surprising. Once Southam invented a musical process that she liked, she frequently continued to work with it over many more pieces. It’s as if she’d give her musical kaleidoscope a slight tap each time — starting on a different note of the tone row, perhaps (as in the twelve pieces of Slow Music and Simple Lines of Enquiry), or changing to a new tone row (Rivers, first and second set). We also know that Southam expressed interest in writing a CD’s worth of Returnings pieces for Eve Egoyan to record.

We will never know Southam’s intentions regarding the pieces on this disc, three of which are dated from the last two years of her life. She was a habitual reviser, so we cannot rule out the possibility that had she lived, she would have replaced these with later versions. But they are beautiful, sure-handed works, and in no way drafts. They deepen our understanding of Southam’s long engagement with the wondrous musical ideas of the Returnings pieces — a creative investigation that began some 18 years earlier, and was cut short by her death.

A LONG GESTATION

The first piece in what I call “the Returnings style” dates from August 1993, and is titled Given Time. Pianist Barbara Pritchard premièred an abbreviated version of the piece the following month, as part of “Dancing the Goddess,” a multi-media show created by several of Southam’s friends and colleagues from her Toronto Dance Theatre days. The fibre artist and painter Aiko Suzuki joined Pritchard onstage, slowly winding and unwinding a skein of yarn throughout the performance of Southam’s piece. This was a visual expression of a feminist metaphor that was fundamental to Southam’s musical aesthetic from the late 1970s onwards: the idea of reflecting, through the processes of minimalist music, activities like weaving, knitting, mending — “life- sustaining, repetitive tasks, which are often associated with women, the kind of work that women traditionally do, over and over, holding the world together, mending,” as the composer said. But Southam always stressed that this feminist dimension, while important to her, was not inherently audible in the music.

After the performances in “Dancing the Goddess,” Given Time appears to have gone underground, like a stream, for some 15 years. Southam did not deposit it at the Canadian Music Centre, which publishes her music on demand. But thanks to further scores discovered posthumously among her papers, we now know that she was re-working Given Time in 2008, the year she was diagnosed with cancer. Three Returnings-style pieces from that year were found among her papers, one in manuscript, two in photo- copy. These pieces, titled There and Back, share many features of Given Time, but are the only Returnings-style pieces that call for loud dynamics.

THE MUSIC

At first, all these Returnings pieces might sound rather the same. But just as an urban listener gradually comes to discern the different birdsongs in a forest soundscape, distinctive characteristics of each piece soon emerge. We follow the composer as she constantly swaps things in and out between the pieces, observing the effect of each change with the patience of a long-time observer of nature. What happens when you reduce the chord layer to a single harmony (Untitled in G, Track 3)? What happens when you do the opposite, packing in 10 different harmonies (Returnings II in B flat, Track 1)? What happens when you go through the whole process of unfurling the tone row again, the second time shifting the row up a half tone (Given Time)? What is the emotional effect when you retain the drone from a previous version, but switch in a different tone row? When you greatly increase the number of pauses (Returnings II in B flat, Track 1)? When you let the music flow without pause for several pages (Untitled in G, Track 3)? When you wait until the very end before crowding in new harmonies (Returnings in A flat, Track 2)? When you end with a major chord instead of an ambiguous, unresolved harmony (Untitled in B flat, Track 5)? When you add an introduction? And so on.

Perhaps it’s best to think of these pieces as a single, ever-changing work, rather than revisions or drafts — especially since we can no longer ask the composer . Every now and then one version would crystallize as a piece to be performed, then was perhaps withdrawn and reworked, the way a potter collapses a wet vase on the wheel and starts again, using the same lump of clay.

In a 2010 interview, in remarks that we can safely extend to the pieces on this disc, Southam described Returnings I as the continual asking of “ Why?” each time in a slightly different way. She also spoke of a “red dissonant line” that she literally saw running through the very consonant, repeating patterns in so much of her music — the dissonance created by a 12-tone row. “Isn’t that life, in a way: trying to accommodate dissonance?” she said.

My sense of the Returnings-style pieces is that Southam has chosen her musical materials in order to obtain the greatest “accommodation of dissonance” possible. The notes of the 12-tone row occur on off-beats that are both destabilizing (as rhetorical interruptions) and pleasurable (as in dance). Each one is immediately “caught” by one of the rocking drone notes, like one dancer catching another, or a knitter scooping up a new stitch in a different colour and drawing it into the emerging fabric. While each pitch of the row creates a different emotional shift as it rubs against the drone, they rarely create a sharp dissonance against the tonic harmony — two of them, of course, are in unison with the drone; many of the others slide into the drones like grace notes. The right-hand chords complete the embrace of the tonic, sometimes inflecting it with nuanced harmonies that never stray far from the drone harmony. And in all five pieces on this disc, the composer instructs the player to change the sustaining pedal on the first note of each measure: this cleanses all dissonance arising from the tone row — like a sandy shore continually washed by gently breaking waves.

Then there are the mysteriously placed pauses that momentarily suspend the flow. The pieces move and breathe in a transcendent, non-urban time, with the ineffable grace and mystery of an animal in the wild. Gentle but not simplistic; mending even as they tear holes, these are wondrous compositions. Together with Simple Lines of Enquiry, they are the quiet, profound fulfillment of a life’s work.

SOME NOTES ON INDIVIDUAL PIECES

1. Returnings II in B flat (2010, op. posth.)
I can imagine that if Southam had lived (and decided) to publish this piece, she would have changed its name, to avoid confusion with Returnings II: A Meditation — the final piece on the CD she planned with Eve. Both date from 2010, and share many elements. The posthumous version is one of only three Returnings to begin with an introduction. In these, the composer lays out her 12-tone row with breathtaking expressivity, and across a wide span of the keyboard — more in the style of her late piano pieces such as In Retrospect (2004) and Simple Lines of Enquiry (2007).
In this piece, however, Southam presents one tone row — or rather, nine of its 12 notes — in the introduction, only to use a different row in the piece proper. With its aching, lyrical sadness, this introduction is a knockout.
The dedication reads, “For Eve Egoyan with love and thanks.”

2. Returnings in A flat (2009, op. posth.)
A special feature of this piece is the way new chord harmonies crowd in at the end, after pages of A-flat major in the outer voices. The tone row is a favourite of Southam’s, found in Simple Lines of Enquiry and many other works.

3. Untitled in G (2009, op. posth.)
This is an exceptionally serene piece, with only one chordal harmony — two positions of a G major chord — throughout, and a beautiful series of lingering pauses near the end. It too uses the Simple Lines of Enquiry row.
Southam rarely indicated the actual day of completion on her manuscripts, but at the end of this piece, where she frequently placed dedications, she wrote “July 15, 2009” — Eve Egoyan’s birthday, as the composer knew.

4. Untitled in A flat (date unknown, op. posth.)
This piece has the same tonality and uses the same tone row as Returnings I, from 2010. It also resembles Returnings II: A Meditation in that there are only two harmonies in the right-hand chords. Once again, Southam uses the Simple Lines of Enquiry tone row.
The dedication reads, “For Eve Egoyan with love and thanks.”

5. Untitled in B flat (date unknown, op. posth.)
A mysterious detail of this piece is that in the last few lines of music, Southam re-spells two notes from the tone row. On a keyboard instrument, this makes no difference to the notes you play, but C sharp is now written as D flat, and F sharp as G flat. From here onwards there are no sharps in the piece: all accidentals are expressed as flats.

© TAMARA BERNSTEIN, 2013