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Thousands of Bundled Straw

a song cycle in seven movements · 1997–2005
Libra Ensemble · Deborah Kayser, soprano · Mark Knoop, conductor
presented by Aphids

This song cycle began in a fishing village near Hiroshima, where I was staying with a young Japanese composer I had met at the Akiyoshidai Contemporary Music Festival in 1997. Each morning I awoke to the sound of drumming and cicadas coming from the local Shinto temple (you can hear this in Movement IV). At night I wandered through ricefields and saw glinting fireflies appearing and disappearing behind the blades of rice. The song cycle replicates the structure of over-packaged Japanese cookies — boxes within boxes, each movement a sealed world inside the whole.

Deborah Kayser — Thousands of Bundled Straw. Photograph: Yatzek.

The title is Japlish and comes from a tourist brochure for Ichibata Yakushi, the Temple of the Healing Eyes on Lake Shinji-ko, in far-western Japan. According to myth, the fisherman Yoichi discovered a statue of the Buddha floating in the sea. In a dream it told him to wrap himself in bundles of straw and throw himself from a cliff. This way his blind mother’s eyes would be opened. He did as instructed and his mother could see. He founded the temple. The statue was placed inside a box within a box within a box behind the temple altar. It is displayed once every hundred years.

The cycle took ten years to finish, each movement commissioned and composed for different musicians. Movements were performed separately around the world before the whole was assembled.

Song 4 in Movement V was written first in that fishing village, for soprano Deborah Kayser and guitarist Geoffrey Morris, both of whom I worked with for 20 years.

The final movement — for the largest forces, the whole ensemble — was created last, and became a process of stripping back, reducing, clearing. How little I needed to insert or force or do. There is a moment in this movement where everything stops and Deborah’s voice sails over a static yet shifting texture in the ensemble. I had planned Song 5 in Movement V to be the vanishing point of the work. Instead, this floating moment — like the impossible statue floating on the sea — turned out to be the still point in my composing life. After it, I no longer wrote formally notated music.

Recording

Score

The score is a handwritten facsimile in seven parts, 260 pages. Duration 54′32″. Individual movements can be performed separately.

Further reading & links

Performance history

Credits — Melbourne Recital Centre, 2009

Credits — Melbourne International Arts Festival, 2005