[This program note is by Georges Lentz, the composer of Guyuhmgan. I collaborated with Georges on the tape part.]

Guyuhmgan is part of a large on-going project called Mysterium (Caeli enarrant...VII). Caeli enarrant...("The Heavens are Telling", the beginning of Psalm XIX), is a larger cycle of works begun in 1989, reflecting my fascination with astronomy as well as some very personal spiritual beliefs. Mysterium, the last part of this cycle, is a conceptual work in an open form, consisting of numerous blocks that can be put together ad libitum. It was originally a work without fixed instrumentation — abstract lines, ideally meant to be 'read' rather than played.

The initial idea to launch myself into this project came to me after reading about Pythagoras' poetic notion of the Music of the Spheres, music which, according to the great Greek thinker, is produced by the friction of the heavenly spheres and is audible to God, but inaudible to human ears. I wanted to write music that does not evolve or unfold, but simply 'is'. The only way to do this seemed to be to write music that does not sound and is thus not subject to the arrow of time. This may sound naïve, even pretentious — it is hard to attempt this kind of project without seeming overly ambitious. In the real world of course, this music, like any music, needs performers to make it come to life.

In some ways, Guyuhmgan is rather similar to my last orchestral work, Ngangkar. It is soft throughout, with dramatic tension being derived mainly from the contrast: between sounds and silence, tonal and quarter‑tone elements, homophonic lines and complex polyphonic material and a regular crotchet beat and graphically rotated rhythmic unpredictability, contracted and expanded time.

My overall aim in this piece, as in all of Mysterium, was to write music that would be as 'pure' and 'serene' as possible. I started writing Guyuhmgan in September 2000 in the tranquillity of my favourite composing place, the old presbytery in the tiny village of Ouren on the Luxembourg-Belgian border — far away from the hustle and bustle of the Sydney Olympics, without a television or even a phone in the house! The complete peace of that place never fails to colour whatever I write. The work was finished in Sydney earlier this year.

In some ways however, Guyuhmgan has meant a new departure for me: with the use of extended playing techniques (so-called 'ugly' or 'scratchy' sounds), which is of course nothing new in contemporary music. It was however only after some internal struggle that I resolved to incorporate such sounds into my current music. The whole philosophy of Mysterium being one of purity, I could at first see no use for such dirty or distorted sounds. Only when I stopped judging and putting labels such as 'beautiful' and 'ugly' on things and instead accepted them for what they are did I begin to open myself to different kinds of beauty — an act of great liberation.

Secondly an important influence behind the composition of Guyuhmgan was my discovery of the works of Australian Aboriginal painter Kathleen Petyarre (some members of the audience might have seen the major exhibition of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney earlier this year). Her huge canvasses filled with innumerable tiny dots (they look a bit like a night sky) made a great impression on me and helped me become bolder in my attempt to write passages of music consisting only of 'dots'. The beginning of Guyuhmgan is a direct reflection of this.

Finally, rhythmic patterns based on those played in the orchestra, but many times faster, are heard in Guyuhmgan. No human musician could reasonably be expected to execute those rhythms with any degree of accuracy — a computer, on the other hand, has no difficulty handling those dimensions. Hence my use of this medium in the new work, the first time I have done so. The use of the computer is meant to highlight the inadequacy of human perception and comprehension in the face of the complexity of reality. Within the rhythmic framework of the piece which is based on crotchets (that appear at different levels of speed and slowness), there is also ample use of rhythmically unpredictable graphic notation within the orchestra, as well as rhythmically undefined passages in the computer part. I see this as the 'completely other', which does not fit into the rhythmic frame, yet is also inextricably part of it: God?

My collaborator on the computer sounds heard in Guyuhmgan was Gordon Monro, lecturer in Mathematics at the University of Sydney as well as a composer in his own right. While Gordon's input on this project was more of a technical nature, he pointed out many sounds and possibilities that have become an integral part of the composition. The computer sounds were generated in a program called Csound. It was important to me to base the electronic sound world entirely on synthetic sounds (more precisely sine waves), as opposed to sounds taken from real life and modified by the computer. The idea was to contrast these sounds with the acoustic properties of the orchestral instruments, but also to highlight the blending possibilities between these diametrically opposed methods of sound production.

The title Guyuhmgan (an Aboriginal—Bundjalung word meaning 'stars') reflects my love of the vast empty space of the Australian landscape with its radiantly beautiful night skies. While any number of interpretations are of course allowed, one possible way to listen to the work might be to forget all the above-mentioned technical details and just imagine a starlit sky with all its different constellations and concentrations, its darkness and light, the vastness of its silence.

Georges Lentz © 2001

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Last modified: August 23, 2001.
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