Ngapa William Cooper 

Nigel Westlake, Lior, Lou Bennett
Andrea Lam, Rebecca Lagos, Kees Boersma
Australian String Quartet
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

I was deeply moved by the performance of Ngapa William Cooper (‘Uncle William Cooper’) at Adelaide Town Hall last Tuesday, following its debut at Ukaria Cultural Centre the previous Friday. The ornate neo-classical splendour of the venue, with its magnificent marble pillars and towering organ-pipes, made me feel like I was back in the Vienna Musikverein, and somehow seemed an appropriate setting for a work which is redolent with a sense of history and occasion while also being rich in musical and cultural complexity. 

 

The song cycle is a follow-up to Compassion, ­a 2013 collaboration between Anglo-Australian composer Nigel Westlake and Israeli-Australian singer-songwriter Lior, which was based on ancient Hebrew and Arabic texts. Their new work is co-written and co-performed with Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung songwriter-composer Lou Bennett (who is also Cooper’s direct descendant) with additional lyric content by Sarah Gorey, and like its precursor is a stylistic crossover with contemporary classical and popular elements. It’s also similarly cross-cultural in inspiration and has the same underlying theme of compassion at its heart. 

 

The work celebrates Yorta Yorta activist William Cooper, who as Secretary of the Australian Aborigines’ League led the only march of protest in the world at that time against the persecution of the Jews in Nazi Germany after Kristallnacht in 1938. Cooper and his fellow protesters marched from his home in Footscray to the inner city of Melbourne and attempted to deliver a petition of condemnation to the German consulate (which needless to say refused to admit them or receive their petition). 

 

Cooper had previously called for Aboriginal representation in Federal Parliament in his petition to King George V – a petition which (in an act of rich historical irony) Prime Minister Joe Lyons likewise failed to pass on to Buckingham Palace. Perhaps unsurprisingly Cooper saw the parallels between the plight of his people and the Jews in Europe, asserting that: ‘We are a very small minority, and we are a poor people, but in extending our sympathy to the Jewish people we assure them of our support in every way.’ 

 

The work began with a stirring traditional ‘Call to Ancestors’ by Lior and Bennett, who stood facing each other and sang in Hebrew and Yorta Yorta. Six sections followed, telling the story of Cooper’s protest and concluding with a reflection on his legacy, with the voices of both singers interweaving, accompanied by Andrea Lam on piano, Rebecca Lagos on percussion and Kees Boersma on double bass. 

 

Westlake’s music is highly accessible, using a base language of post-Impressionism peppered with elements of jazz and rock, and is full of tonal colour and syncopated rhythms. In terms of harmonic progression and melodic material I found it a bit static and repetitive at times – reminding me of an older generation of Australian composers like Sculthorpe or Ross Edwards – but it was richly evocative, especially in descriptive passages like the one that accompanied the protest march itself.

 

Lior sang in English from Cooper’s perspective, his voice finely spun and delicate as a reed instrument, while Bennett’s rich, bluesy contralto responded with words and phrases in Yorta Yorta that were intuitively connected with the content of each section, evoking themes of endearment, loss, family, protest, mourning and commemoration. Bennett also joined Lagos on percussion in one movement by shaking eucalyptus leaves, which evoked a sense of place and ritual, and reminded me of the sound of wings in flight. 

 

Before interval, two works were performed by the redoubtable Australian String Quartet. Bryce Dessner’s Aheym(Homeward) was a thrilling opening, written very much in a post-minimalist idiom; this was followed by arch-minimalist Philip Glass’s nostalgic and lyrical String Quartet No.3 ‘Mishima’, which was originally written as a film score for the Paul Schrader movie about the Japanese author (and quasi-fascist) who committed seppuku after a failed military coup (possibly a somewhat off-key choice in this regard, given the content of the main item that followed). Both works were given incisive renditions by the quartet, with superbly blended sound, exquisite tonal range and (in the Dessner) pounding rhythmic attack.

 

All in all, then, a musically satisfying evening – and in the case of the song cycle, a timely and fitting tribute to a towering figure in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country and across history. 

 

*

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He’s currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He’s also the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.