Riddles and Solutions

This year not only commemorates Larry Sitsky’s ninetieth year, it also marks sixty-five years since the composition of his first mature work: his self-proclaimed “opus one”, the 1959 Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin. Composed by a young Sitsky aboard a ship destined for further musical study in the United States, the sonata marked the onset of a life-long compositional journey and the beginning of an era of prodigious creative output. Since 1959, Sitsky has composed continuously, with at least one work completed almost every year since; 1976 is the exception to this pattern. His ever-increasing compositional output has reached an unfathomable scale of well over two hundred works. Loath to write the same composition twice, Sitsky’s compositional oeuvre exhibits a vast and eclectic array of compositional styles and techniques. Even to this day, Sitsky’s style continues to transform. His rejection of creative stasis is paradoxically something of a hallmark of his creative output. Sitsky’s myriad life experiences have shaped his compositions, which he regards as “biographical milestones on the road to self-awareness”.

Sitsky played a key role in transforming the aesthetic landscape of Australian composition in the 1960s. As a young composer invigorated by the stimulating musical environment in America, Sitsky lamented the artistic conditions he encountered upon his return to Australia. Frustrated by the conservative establishment of Australian composition, headed by a small coterie of powerful composers and conductors, Sitsky set out to “put a bomb under” this old guard. The young composer began incorporating avant-garde musical techniques such as electronic effects, elements of chance, aleatoricism and highly mathematical serial procedures into his compositions. Sitsky soon earned the reputation of an enfant terrible, and his compositions from this time sparked incredulity and occasional outrage amongst the Australian musical community. Reflecting contemporary local sentiment, a Brisbane newspaper ridiculed Sitsky’s use of musique concrète, printing a cartoon of a concrete mixer being wheeled into a concert hall. (The cartoon hangs proudly in Sitsky’s office at the Australian National University.)

But it was Sitsky’s satirical Woodwind Quartet, composed for the 1963 Australian Composers’ Seminar in Hobart, that truly prompted something of an uproar. After its premiere performance, composers hissed, with veteran composer George Selwyn English labelling the quartet a “hoax”. Others praised Sitsky’s musical daring, associating it with long-awaited progress in composition in Australia. In the words of Sydney Morning Herald music critic Roger Covell, the response to the provocative Woodwind Quartet marked the “breaking of a long drought of indifference” in Australian music.

Sitsky’s travels to Russia and China in the 1970s and 1980s triggered his feeling of creative emancipation during this period. These voyages were a spiritual homecoming for the composer, who experienced a cultural affirmation upon reacquaintance with his ethnic heritage.

From the 1970s, Sitsky began to cultivate a more idiosyncratic, personal style. Seeking a more expressive means of musical communication, his compositions bear the hallmarks of an engagement with a range of extramusical stimuli including a vast array of philosophical, mystical and mythological sources. His approach to serialism became increasingly flexible, serving only an ancillary role in his compositions.

When reflecting on his evolving style and the incorporation of mystic influences during the 1970s, Sitsky explains: “I had found an escape from post-Second World War serialism that was at once free and logical and suited my temperament.” Sitsky’s travels to Russia and China in the 1970s and 1980s triggered his feeling of creative emancipation during this period. These voyages were a spiritual homecoming for the composer, who experienced a cultural affirmation upon reacquaintance with his ethnic heritage. This experience profoundly affected Sitsky’s creative output, and his music began to incorporate Russian, Jewish and Chinese influences more fully and unapologetically. Numerous works draw on Buddhist chant, Armenian folk music, and his 1980s grand opera The Golem notably incorporates traditional Jewish music. Sitsky’s treatment of the original Buddhist, Armenian and Hebraic source material is not that of literal transcription but rather his own assimilation and interpretation of the folk and sacred music. His method of drawing upon and assimilating traditional and sacred musical sources in his own musical language is a key aspect of his overarching compositional practice.

Almost all the works from the 1970s onwards owe their impetus to a mystical or mythological extramusical stimulus—what Sitsky refers to as a “springboard”. These stimuli function just as the metaphor suggests: a jumping-off point from which the composer garners inspiration. “What’s difficult to explain,” Sitsky elucidates, “is that these non-musical sources are the beginning, not the end. That the idea, or the mythology, or a piece of poetry, starts the sound in my head. It’s not a literal interpretation.”

In addition to Chinese and Jewish sources, Sitsky’s compositions demonstrate his engagement with myriad mystic sources such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Sufi poetry, Occultism and Gnosticism. Despite the breadth and eclecticism of Sitsky’s output, stylistic trademarks emerge across his oeuvre to form a certain “Sitskian” aesthetic. These characteristics create a sound world akin to an aural signature, like a type of compositional identity embedded in the score. Meticulously devised, Sitsky’s works frequently exhibit a highly improvisatory and rhapsodic character with sweeping expressionistic gestures. Elusive, almost imperceptible motives colour and give shape to his works as the listener is guided on an aural journey.

Opera occupies an immensely significant position in Sitsky’s oeuvre. Described by the composer as a “vehicle of magic” through which he can “explore the borderlands of human experience”, opera is well-suited to Sitsky’s creative personality. His operas exemplify some of the hallmarks of his compositional signature: his fascination with the fantastic, his exploration of large-scale grand forms, his fervent engagement with literary sources, and his life-long association with the music and philosophies of the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni. Sitsky’s operas are the fruit of one of the most significant artistic collaborations in Australian cultural history; that is, the composer Sitsky and the celebrated poet and librettist Gwen Harwood. The Sitsky–Harwood collaboration yielded seven operas or large-scale vocal works: The Fall of the House of Usher (1965), Lenz (1971), Fiery Tales (1975), Voices in Limbo (1977), Music in the Mirabell Garden (1977), De Profundis (1982) and The Golem (1980). More recently, Sitsky has completed his totally virtual opera Doktor Faustus (2017) and the Gnostic mass Ecclesiae Gnosticae Catholicae Canon Missae (2019).

Sitsky’s first opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, is based on Edgar Allan Poe’s novel of the same name. Composed for the 1965 Festival of Contemporary Opera, Usher almost did not make it to the stage. Rehearsals were halted by the Tasmanian police, who were determined to censor the opera’s performance after a tip-off that the libretto contained references to incest. The libretto contained no such references, however, and the opera was permitted to proceed. Reminiscent of Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, Usher was one of the first operas to be staged at the Sydney Opera House. Programmed alongside James Penberthy’s Dalgerie for a special “trial” performance, Sitsky’s opera was nevertheless performed to paying audiences on July 27 and 28, 1973, nearly three months before the official opening. History has often glossed over this detail, preferring to acknowledge Prokofiev’s War and Peace on September 28, 1973. Sitsky coyly remarked at the time, “You can only open a can of sardines once.”

Sitsky never shed this streak of healthy irreverence, and as he continued to compose his sense of artistic freedom intensified. Sitsky’s compositions from the end of the 1980s bear unmistakable signs of late maturity. Free from any perceived stylistic confines, the composer reflects that as he got older, he was “not afraid of failure” and became “more tolerant to crazy ideas”. This sense of compositional liberation heightened with the new millennium. Such momentous calendrical milestones tend not to go unnoticed by composers; recall Monteverdi’s fourth and fifth books of madrigals at the turn of the seventeenth century, or Beethoven’s shift from his early to middle period at the turn of the nineteenth, or Busoni’s Piano Concerto at the turn of the twentieth. For Sitsky, The Way of the Seeker (2004) represents something of a watershed composition. The six-movement cycle, around fifty minutes long, exemplifies how the piano serves as a vehicle for creative rejuvenation for artists approaching late maturity. Similar cases can be observed with Beethoven’s Op. 101 piano sonata, Bartók’s piano sonata and Out of Doors suite, and Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli. The Way of the Seeker was the first in a series of large-scale works for solo piano that Sitsky has composed in the last two decades, including Dimensions of Night (2008) and The Golden Dawn (2009), up to the last and most recent of these, the Apocryphon of Initiation (2019). Composed as a sort of companion piece to Beethoven’s similarly monumental Hammerklavier, Apocryphon—a “concerto for solo piano without orchestra”—represents Sitsky’s final word in this long trend of writing ambitious multi-movement suites and cycles for piano.

Much like many of Liszt’s late piano pieces, the writing in Sitsky’s late piano pieces is often bare.

In these last few years, there has been yet another shift in Sitsky’s approach to piano composition. These recent piano pieces—a set of preludes and three collections of “late piano pieces”—are strikingly different from their epically proportioned predecessors. If the phase of piano composition bookended by The Way of the Seeker and Apocryphon of Initiation could be characterised as one of expansion and monumentalism, then the current phase is just the opposite: marked by distillation and crystallisation. Many of these newer pieces are brief, at times even aphoristic. Comparisons could be made with Beethoven’s late bagatelles, Busoni’s Seven Short Pieces for Polyphonic Playing (1923) and Liszt’s late piano works. Indeed, Sitsky notes: “I finally understand where the late Liszt pieces came from: they seem to be a product of old age, and seem to contain a sense of objectivity and impersonality about them.”

Much like many of Liszt’s late piano pieces, the writing in Sitsky’s late piano pieces is often bare. What once would have been conceived in a dense and complex texture, he now treats economically, making unequivocally clear his compositional ideas and intentions. This poses an altogether different challenge for the pianist-interpreter, for there is nothing quite as ungenerous, acoustically speaking, as a piano sounding only one or two notes at a time. For the listener, such passages can sound refreshingly direct but also enigmatic and intriguing.

Sitsky’s first collection of Late Piano Pieces (2021–22) consists of seven pieces. Most are only a couple of pages long. Four of them, “Sol Invictus”, “Vitriol”, “Chöd” and “Multum in Parvo”, are grouped under the designation “Four Cryptic”. Brevity and directness of musical gesture are key characteristics of these pieces. Imagine an orator entering the stage to recite a haiku and then exiting without any elaboration. Indeed, cryptic proves an apt descriptor of this music.

The idea for his next set of piano pieces originates with one of Sitsky’s piano students, Hannah Th’ng, who suggested a cycle of preludes in the vein of Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. Though Sitsky’s Twenty-Four Preludes make a nod to composers of the past, they are structured according to an unusual plan. Rather than cycling through all twenty-four major and minor tonalities, Sitsky only appropriates (and, in some cases, hijacks) the traditional key signatures to produce musical variety. Strictly speaking, these preludes are not in any key per se; they are only written with a fixed key signature. Rather, Sitsky often subverts the expected tonality, opting to engage in ingenious musical games and exploiting the novel intervallic combinations that lie dormant in certain synthetic key signatures.

After the preludes came a second collection of piano pieces, composed in 2022 and 2023, again bearing the title Late Piano Pieces, though with the added subtitle, “Second Series”. The composer notes: “These are separate pieces, not a unified cycle.” There are more pieces here than in the first series; altogether there are thirty-one, with one, “The Pools of Solomon”, consisting of three individual movements, to be played attacca.

Both series of Late Piano Pieces share common features. Most notably, the piano texture is significantly thinner. Pieces like “Multum in Parvo” from series one, or the beginning and conclusion of “The Dead Sea” from series two, feature long stretches of music consisting almost entirely of sustained single notes played slowly and softly. In the case of “The Dead Sea”, its notation, with its chains of long pedalled notes, gives the visual impression of a prelude by the French composer Rameau. This kind of exposed writing can be best seen in “Megiddo” from series two. Consisting almost entirely of single notes, “Megiddo” is composed for the right hand alone.

Sitsky’s piano music is written for pianists by a pianist.

In both Late Piano Pieces, Sitsky is less interested in the piano as a keyboard instrument and more concerned with its vocal and percussive potential. In pieces like “The Tears of Jeremiah” from series two, the right hand adopts the role of the vocalist, half-sung and half-spoken. Sitsky makes his intention clear with indications such as chant-like in “Song of Moses on Mount Nebo”, or incantatory style in “Adonai”. Meanwhile, the left hand’s accompaniment resembles not so much a pianist in a Schubert lieder but rather that of the gosu drummer in Korean pansori. Here and there, a well-timed percussive cluster chord interjects from down below in the bass register and punctuates the leading declamatory arioso of the right hand. Although the pianistic texture remains relatively thin in these pieces, they are some of the most musically rhetorical passages in all of Sitsky’s late piano music. More like the lamentation of a flamenco singer than a piano piece, they grab the listener’s attention from the first note to the last.

The degree to which Sitsky employs percussive effects on the piano varies with each piece in both Late Piano Pieces. The most moderate expressions of this percussive approach to the piano can be seen in “Edinburgh Castle” and “Shemiramot” from, respectively, series one and two. The role of the left hand as drummer is made clear by the way in which the notes are arranged in the notation; in place of sustained tones, Sitsky writes short, detached chords in the lower register, where pitch tends to lose its definition even more, and reinforces this with the instruction secco (meaning like a drum). The ancestor to this kind of percussive treatment of the piano can be found in Bartók; for instance, his piano piece “With Drums and Pipes”.

Arm clusters are also striking visual reminders of just how percussive the piano can be. This extended technique involves depressing the keys on the piano with the arm rather than the fingers. Sitsky undoubtedly employs it as a percussive device but also to rapidly achieve an unusually loud dynamic, such as in the central climax of the “The Dead Sea”, as well as in “Hadād: God of Thunder” from series two.

Sitsky carries the percussive logic of the piano to a degree of extreme abstraction in “Chöd” and “Drums” from, respectively, series one and two. In both pieces, the composer instructs the pianist to close the lid of the keyboard, leaving it shut throughout, with no recourse to the keys of the piano at all. Yet, remarkably, this music is not without pitch. Sitsky instructs the pianist to employ the pedal for the entirety of the piece, allowing for sympathetic resonance to freely occur across all strings and throughout the soundboard. He also encourages the use of amplification to fully exploit dynamic nuances. In the case of “Chöd”, Sitsky even recommends the pianist to use a bass drum to mark the conclusion of the piece, especially in the probable scenario that the instruction slam lid down violently is not feasible! Even in the most uncharitable moments—more so for the instrument than the instrumentalist—Sitsky’s pragmatism offers a helpful alternative.

In the second Late Piano Pieces, there is an element of virtuosity not seen in series one. Some of these pieces exploit a particular technique, including double octaves in “Nephilim” (composed for Sitsky’s student Aaron Chew) and rapid scales in the concert etude “Ruah”. Pieces like “The Witch of Endor” and “The Wings of Hermes” explore repeated notes and hand crossings. These two pieces are dedicated to pianists Michael Kieran Harvey and Edward Neeman, and are musical-pianistic portraits of their dedicatees. If judged by their number of pages, these pieces are some of the longest in the series. However, owing to their fast tempi, their actual duration lasts only a matter of minutes. Especially in the prestissimo coda of “The Wings of Hermes”, the resulting musical effect is unsettling, spectral and ephemeral, in parts dark and nebulous and then gone in a flash.

Not unlike Busoni’s two Indian Diaries composed in 1915, the first for piano solo and the second for orchestra, there is a clear, if distant, relationship between Sitsky’s 1991 concerto for piano and orchestra and his even-more-recently completed third series of Late Piano Pieces. The former is based on tarot’s Major Arcana and the latter on the Minor Arcana. These two works, separated by no less than three decades, clearly demonstrate the change in Sitsky’s compositional preoccupation towards miniaturisation. Having recently completed this series three, Sitsky is now engaged with composing a piano sonata for four hands. It is exciting to wait and see how the composer will distribute the various atmospheric devices of chant, percussion and virtuosity across not just two but four hands.

Sitsky’s piano music is written for pianists by a pianist. As strangely self-evident as this may sound, it nevertheless bears reiterating, as this tends to be more the exception than the rule nowadays. Moreover, Sitsky’s piano music is not just written by any pianist, but a first-class one. Busoni, writing of the great pianist-composers before him—Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt—remarked: “They perceived new means, solved the problems of new effects, created ‘improbable difficulties’ and wrote a literature of their own.” This is what makes many of Sitsky’s piano works so unique, challenging and, ultimately, artistically satisfying: each new piece presents both the riddle and its solution.

Raymond Shon is an Australian concert pianist. Stephanie Shon is a musicologist and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford.

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