Program: 01 | Anna Goldsworthy: Kairos

That was the opening of Felix Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, which was composed in Leipzig in 1839, and hailed immediately as a success. The composer Robert Schumann – who was also one of the Nineteenth Century’s most insightful critics – declared it ‘the master trio of our age,’ and predicted that it ‘will gladden our grandchildren and great-grandchildren for many years to come.’ And here we are, 175 years later – great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren by now – and, speaking for myself at least, still quite glad.

This was also the very first trio I studied with my two friends on this recording, Helen Ayres on violin and Tim Nankervis on cello, twenty-six years ago, when we began playing together as Seraphim Trio. Helen and I had both grown up in Adelaide, but then I moved to the United States, and Helen to Sydney, where she met Tim. When I returned to Australia, we were invited to form a trio for masterclasses at the new Australian National Academy of Music. So I flew to Sydney to meet Tim – fortunately I liked him immediately – and after a week of rehearsals we caught the overnight train to Melbourne, to play for the legendary violist and pedagogue Hatto Beyerle.

Hatto had been a founding member of the celebrated Berg Quartet. He was a passionate exponent of chamber music, which is the type of music you just heard us play: music on a human scale, with a single voice to a part – like a piano trio or a string quartet – and ideally heard in the intimate setting of a chamber or a room rather than in a cavernous concert hall.

As we played for Hatto, trying desperately to impress him, he listened patiently, and then – towards the end of the passage you just heard – he gently lifted his hand and gestured for us to stop.

‘Do not just count in this entry,’ he said, softly but emphatically. ‘If you just count, it is just business in music. Instead, this entry must occur at the exact moment you all feel it must happen.’

And so we tried once again, staring intensely at each other as if we could will ourselves into perfect ensemble, but again he lifted his hand for us to stop.

 ‘There is a difference between the Ancient Greek concept of Chronos,’ he said, ‘which is time that can be measured, and Kairos, which means the right time. Simply play these chords at the moment they demand to be heard.’ 

And as soon as we did this – as soon as we stopped trying to second-guess each other, but instead surrendered to that collective knowledge – our ensemble worked. And in a way, all of our work since has been guided by this notion of Kairos. Of seeking the right, shared moment.

Today I’d like to share some of these moments with you. For many years the three of us lived in Melbourne, rehearsing together daily, and travelling frequently to Hanover to work with Hatto. We entered international competitions, and established our own concert series; we toured; we commissioned a library of new works from Australian composers; and we collaborated with artists ranging from soprano Lorina Gore to singer-songwriter Paul Kelly to street artist Peter Drew. 

And all the while we came to know each other so intimately that we could anticipate a musical gesture from the tiniest hint of body language or a caught breath, or from not even that: instead from that shared listening, that mutual understanding of Kairos. And as we passed through all of these right moments together – as well as any number of wrong moments – we also watched each other step into adulthood and get grown-up jobs and find partners and move to different cities and have children and suffer loss and start to age. And all the while we lived alongside this music like a touchstone. Every time we picked it up and looked at it from another angle, it had something new to say to us.

Our first trip to Germany together was in 2001. Hatto lived in a refurbished windmill outside Hanover; and on our visits, which continued over the next fifteen years, we stayed nearby in a stone farmhouse with a local family, getting to know them so well they became our family too. We rehearsed on the ancient Steinway in their drawing room, gorging ourselves in our breaks on strawberries, red and sweet and as big as apples.

We began our work with Hatto on Beethoven’s Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1, the very first piece Beethoven officially published in 1794, after he had moved to Vienna, keen to make his mark on the wider world.

Goethe once wrote that listening to a string quartet made him feel as if he was eavesdropping on a conversation between four intelligent people, and it is this quality of discourse – of listening and responding – that sits at the heart of this type of music-making. Hatto took us through the laws of rhetoric as they exist in this music: the rule of three; the calls and responses; the non sequiturs; the moments of surprise.

When Beethoven left his hometown of Bonn for Vienna, one of his great supporters, Count Waldstein, predicted that he would ‘receive the spirit of Mozart from the hands of Haydn.’

Mozart had died, tragically and prematurely, the previous year. But the great Joseph Haydn was still alive, and he agreed to take Beethoven on as a student. I like Waldstein’s quote because it speaks of something fundamental to classical music: this notion of generational transfer, of passing culture down. And even though Beethoven’s first trio is clearly stamped with his fingerprint, we can also hear the influence of Haydn throughout, not least in the humour and elements of surprise.

All of this would have sounded quite different in the salons of Vienna, in Beethoven’s time.  The violin and cello would have used gut strings, which produce a more intimate sound, while the piano would have been what we now call a fortepiano – a brown piano, with a more narrow range and delicate action. Presumably, the last thing Beethoven would have imagined would have been for this trio to be performed on a big black glossy instrument like the one you just heard me play, which is essentially mid-nineteenth century technology… and for this sound to be transported through the twentieth-century technology of waves in the air into the ears of thousands of people in their homes or their cars or walking their dogs – yes, dear listener, I’m talking to you – and for all of this to be readily accessible via the twenty-first-century technology of our phones, at a time when Elon Musk plans to put a million people on Mars, and multitasking robots are informed by generative AI.

And yet, even as these external settings change – at an exponential pace – there is a continuity to the inner experience of what it is to be human. And it is this inner experience that this music addresses directly, and that connects Helen, Tim and myself not just to each other, and not even just to you, but also to those generations that have come before and, I hope to those generations yet to come.

This is a concept that is often beautifully articulated – and enacted – by indigenous communities. In their generous book Songspirals: Sharing women’s wisdom of Country through songlines, the Gay’wu Group of Women describe what song spirals mean to the Yolngu people: 

songspirals connect us through the generations, to our knowledge, to those that have come before and those yet to emerge. Our children are also keepers of the flame.

But in our contemporary western culture of disposability and built-in redundancy, we’re sometimes in danger of forgetting this. Inherited knowledge is the foundation of everything we’ve achieved as a species. Even A.I., which can feel like a departure from all our ways of doing things, and potentially like a departure from our very humanity – is, at its best, an accumulation of generations of human knowledge. As is the miraculous technology of language itself, another tool that can be used for good or for bad. And as is music.

Classical music is a term that many ‘classical musicians’ are a little allergic to. It can sound exclusionary – a club with secret codes like the Masons – or quaintly redundant, like a Society for Creative Anachronism, in which people dress up in Medieval armour and joust with lances. But what does it actually mean? In his recent book, The Shortest History of Music, Andrew Ford describes classical music as ‘an endlessly adaptable system of notating sound, [which] led to the composition and preservation of the world's largest body of music.’

This sounds as good a working definition as any. In the same way that the invention of the written word allowed texts of magnificent complexity to be created, so too did the invention of notated music. And those texts could then be conveyed across time – provided they withstood its unforgiving tests. As the (Adelaide based!) Nobel Prize winning novelist John Coetzee writes in his essay, ‘What is a Classic?’:

If there is anything that gives one confidence in the classic status of Bach, it is the testing process he has been through within the profession … Bach is some kind of touchstone because he has passed the scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of intelligences before me, by hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings.

But although the texts of classical music are notated, their language is conveyed as an oral tradition, from teacher to student – from one hand to another – down the generations, even across cultures. When I was nine years old, I met the teacher who was to change my life, Eleonora Sivan, shortly after she’d arrived in Australia with her family from Leningrad. Countless hours of my childhood were spent sitting alongside Eleonora at the piano, as she patiently, painstakingly shaped my hands into the hands of a pianist; and patiently, painstakingly taught me the language of music. It is a privilege to have such a mentor in my life, and it has been a privilege to have other mentors too, such as Hatto Beyerle, and the pianist Ronald Farren-Price; as it is now a privilege to have my own students, and to be a link in this chain. 

But this is not a privilege that has been available to everyone. Too many have been precluded for reasons of gender, class, or racial background. In the next installment of the Boyer Lectures, Noongar musician Aaron Wyatt looks at what this means for indigenous musicians, while I’d like to speak for a moment about the invisibility of women composers. 

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf invents a fictional sister for Shakespeare, Judith, who was ‘as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school.’ Felix Mendelssohn, who we started with today, had a non-fictional sister, Fanny. And because she came from a wealthy family, and had a gifted brother, she was the beneficiary of an excellent musical education, and was hailed as Felix’s equal: as a prodigy.

But as the siblings approached adulthood, her future became clear. Her father wrote her a letter:

Music may perhaps become [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.

Felix shared these sentiments, and discouraged Fanny from publishing throughout her life, though occasionally he published her work under his own name. Nevertheless, she continued to compose for her private house concerts, until her sudden death at the age of forty-one. A stricken (and repentant) Felix arranged posthumous publication of several of her works, including her own Trio in D minor, but he never really recovered from her death, following her to the grave just six months afterwards.

Fanny’s trio is a sweeping work of grand ambition, composed almost on the scale of a symphony, as if it’s seeking to burst out of the chamber into somewhere more public.

Virginia Woolf suggested, “that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman”. It turns out that Anon was also very busy in the world of music. She was singing lullabies to infants; she was accompanying singalongs and school choirs; she was keeping music alive in house concerts and eisteddfods and music societies; and above all she was teaching music to multiple generations of children. At the same time, she was much less likely to be celebrated as a soloist; and she would almost never be a conductor or a composer. She was the home cook rather than the celebrity chef, part of the unacknowledged labour of women, which feminist economist Marilyn Waring identified as “counting for nothing”.

It’s tempting to wag a finger at male cultural gatekeepers here, but as a female musician and artistic director, I too have been complicit. When we first started performing together as  Seraphim Trio, it rarely occurred to us to seek out the work of women composers – which now seems astonishing. Now we make it out mission to champion female voices, and have just finished recording a program of chamber music by the great nineteenth century piano virtuoso Clara Schumann; the Croatian countess Dora Pejačević; the fascinating Frenchwoman Germaine Tailleferre, who was the only female member of the avant-garde group Les Six; and the Australian composer Elizabeth Younan, who composed her Piano Trio while still a student.

Elizabeth Younan recalls a musical upbringing in which she was ‘richly and intimately grounded in the Western classical music tradition,’ but also, thanks to her Lebanese background, was ‘exposed to a multitude of classical and popular Arabic music.’

Like Helen, Tim and myself, Elizabeth benefited from something the imaginary Judith Shakespeare did not: an artistic education. 

We have managed to put a screen in almost every human hand, I would like to see a musical instrument in every hand. And particularly in the hands of our children: to teach them the art of attention, as well as the art of boredom. To teach them how to listen to each other, and how to connect. 

Finland is a world leader in music education for children, with the value of music enshrined in the curriculum by government legislation. In Australia, things have been more patchy. Music education in schools has fallen between the gaps in our federation, with some states – such as Queensland – doing markedly better than others, and private schools often doing much better than public. Children of privilege enjoy all the benefits of early music training, and the gap widens.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if Big Pharma patented a single drug with proven effects that included improvements to working memory, logic processing and literacy; the fostering of empathy; the establishment of more robust immune systems; the prevention of “self-esteem decline”; a reduction in depression and mental illness; and the enhancement of social cohesion, compassion and cooperation. These are just some of the benefits of music education listed in Dr Anita Collins’ 2019 report “Music Education: A Sound Investment”.

The emerging field of the ‘social neuroscience of music’ explores the cocktail of benefits that occur not only when we listen to music, but when we make music together. Even before Covid, we were facing the so-called ‘loneliness paradox’: unprecedented connectivity married to widespread feelings of disconnection.

Before devices, before televisions, before phonographs, the piano was the spiritual harth of the middle-class home: a gathering point and (as Jane Austen testified) the location of interminable recitals. This is not some distant European custom, but part of our own heritage. Early Melbourne allegedly boasted the greatest number of pianos per capita of any world city. They were a symbol of gold-rush affluence and aspiration, but they also represented cultural continuity in a world in flux. 

By the 1960s, families were less likely to gather around the piano than around the television; these days, they’re less likely to gather around anything, as they commune with private screens in their own private rooms.

Classical music is no stranger to loneliness. Shostakovich’s second piano trio was composed in Stalinist Russia in 1944, and bears witness to a dark chapter of human history. It begins with a type of lament in the cello, high up in harmonics at the very top of its register, followed several bars later by the entrance of the violin with the same theme, lower for once than its larger colleague, operating at the register of human voice, followed finally by the piano, in the lowest depths of the keyboard, like the double bass section of an orchestra. The distribution of texture creates a feeling of great amplitude, a three-dimensional space through which these three instruments wander, singing the same lament –– but never quite meeting. 

My teacher, Eleonora Sivan, drawing on her own experiences of the Soviet Union, would ask ‘what is to live in community, in hundreds, in thousands, and be completely lonely? What is it to never ever have chance to have consonance?’ 

Music is a capacious art, and its project is our full humanity: it can be confronting and reassuring and challenging and heartbreaking. In a world that’s lost its optimism, it sometimes seems as if the only mission of any self-respecting art is to report on darkness. I would like to advance, unfashionably, the idea that there’s also something to be said for turning your face towards beauty.

At the Mildura Writers Festival this year, Christos Tsiolkas said that he loves art ‘when it rages and when it storms and when it roars. But at this moment, I need the novel and film and poetry the most, when it reminds me – hope against hope – that there is also beauty.’  

In 1914, the French composer Maurice Ravel completed his Piano Trio in a world that was also in crisis. He was keen to enlist in the French army, and feared that this trio might be a ‘posthumous work,’. But there’s a sensual beauty to his writing that transcends the uncertain conditions of his time, and is utterly transporting. 

Hatto passed away last year, but his words about Kairos - the ‘right time’ - live on in our trio. Though sometimes it doesn’t feel like the right time at all. Climate change, global conflict, and… the bots are coming. They’ll be better than us at most things. We’ll be tempted to outsource everything to them: our cognition, our children’s cognition, our art, and ultimately perhaps, our planet. Anyone who argues for the old-fashioned pleasures of making music together risks being dismissed as a Luddite. And yet I believe that this argument is the truly futuristic one. An AI will produce stunning forgeries of music, but it will not understand the way it resonates in a human soul. It will not understand, on a cellular level, the difference between Chronos and Kairos. Our need for the beauty and connection of music has never been more urgent than it is now, at this right, shared moment.