Leviathan
WHAT IS LEVIATHAN
This is the first movement of a large work inspired by whaling in South Australia I am slowly writing. I’ve previously written and premiered the second and third movements.
I began this work during the pandemic when I was living in Victor Harbor and saw live whales for the first time. I was inspired by the history of whaling in Victor, from slaughter, to 100 years of empty ocean, to a gradual return of whales when the area was declared a sanctuary. As the work has progressed, the algal bloom has become a new SA ocean catastrophe and the theme of devastation/hope has taken on a new angle in the music.
This first movement is inspired by the nineteenth century industrial hunger for whale oil, as well as the experience of a whale hunt. Through male voices, percussion and movement I wanted to create a sense of men working together, in factories, in whaling boats, in the colonial age of British Empire.
I’ve drawn from a range of evocative nineteenth century writing to create the libretto for this work.
Mark Oates, Alex Roose, Nicholas Canon, Emlyn O’Regan
Festival Statesmen Chorus
Andrew Wiering
PERFORMERS
DIRECTOR
Nicholas Canon
COSTUME DESIGNER
Clare Langsford
LIBRETTO
Comes now. I send these lines to you,
From here where constellations sink, below the ocean’s western brink.
Take them: for that day will come, to add us to the canceled sum.
And give our bones to earth to rot, for we have no immortal lot,
And souls that will not last forever.
Who hath desired the Sea ? - the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve, as the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges?
Comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song.
It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity
the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and soulful.
The ingenious purveyor of canned music is urging man, on his way to the silent place with gun and rod,
And disks, cranks, and cogs to sing.
Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?
The Captains of Industry are made of other clay. The Captains of Industry are the true fighters
Who fight against chaos, who fight against necessity, who fight against the devils.
The stars in their courses fight for them. All heaven all earth saying
Let the Captains of Industry ask “is nothing hidden?”
Let the Captains of Industry ask “is nothing there?”
There is yet the God-like slumbering.
Heave. Pull you bastards (beauties)
I conjure nightmare sleepers, I conjure thee awake.
Arise or be fallen for our world cannot live as it is.
The heart of man is very much like the sea,
When, like dark plague-spots by the demons shed,
Charged deep with death, upon the waves, far seen,
and fierce and red, The mangled dead.
it has its storms, it has its tides
and in its depths it has its pearls too.
There will be no majestic drums.
The stately ships go on
But o for the touch of a vanish'd hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.
—-
John Philip Sousa
Thomas Carlyle
Charlotte Smith
Vincent Van Gogh
Lord Tennyson
A E Housman
Rudyard Kipling
