Libra Ensemble

Thousands of Bundled Straw

a song cycle in seven parts by David Young

At once epic, subtle and witty, this fascinating song cycle features twelve instrumentalists and soprano Deborah Kayser, who consistently delights audiences worldwide with the rare sonic purity of her voice.

Thousands of Bundled Straw is a major new work by Australian composer David Young inspired by an ancient myth of the Temple of the Healing Eyes in far west Japan. After a decade of development in collaboration with the Libra Ensemble, this studio recording took place immediately after the first performance of the cycle in its entirety.

Deborah Kayser, soprano
Mark Knoop, conductor

Natasha Anderson, recorders
Matthew Tighe, oboe / cor anglais
Carl Rosman, clarinets
Tristram Williams, trumpet
Ben Marks, trombone
Peter Neville, percussion
Mark Kruger, piano
Geoffrey Morris, guitar
Elizabeth Sellars, violin
Jason Bunn, viola
Rosanne Hunt, violoncello
Dorit Herskovits, contrabass

Sound engineer Jim Atkins (ABC)

Producer Rosemary Joy
Photo Yatzek with make up by Rose Walsh
Supported by Arts Victoria, Melbourne International Arts Festival, ABC Classic FM and MadFish Fine Wine.

COMPOSER'S NOTE

Thousands of bundled straw began with the myth of Yoichi as recounted in a tourist brochure from the Ichibata Yakushi (Temple of the Healing Eyes) in Shimane Prefecture, Japan.

Some 1100 years ago, Yoichi, a fisherman, found a stone statue of the Buddha floating on the sea. That night, the statue appeared to Yoichi in a dream, telling him that if he threw himself off a cliff, his mother—who was blind—would have her sight restored. The next day he wrapped bundles of straw around himself, and jumped off the cliff. Yoichi survived, his mother could see, and he founded the Temple of the Healing Eyes, which is there to this day.

In 1997 I walked the 1000 steps up the hill from Lake Shinji to visit the Zen Buddhist temple complex. It is said to house the original statue that Yoichi found and dreamt about. This statue is customarily hidden from view; displayed to the public only once every 100 years.

The text for the song cycle is inspired by various tourist brochures, biscuit packets, and the writings of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. For example, the fifth movement, for soprano and guitar, echoes with fragments from Calvino’s reflections on the turtle-love-making season in Palomar.

The third movement is a homage to Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, in which he describes an entire Parisian apartment block as encountered in a single slice of time. The novel moves systemically from room to corridor to stairwell to room.

The song cycle draws further inspiration from other works by Perec. His virtuosic novel A Void was written without any use of the letter ‘e’, and the English translation from the French also manages to maintain this restriction. A Gallery Portrait is Perec’s short story about an art collector who commissions a portrait: this portrait shows the collector standing next to the very portrait he has commissioned, repeating and receding to infinity.

In addition to these literary sources, Thousands of bundled straw owes much to my many visits to Japan. I have always been fascinated by the mangled fragments of English often used in Japanese advertising (sometimes called ‘Japlish’). Hence the title of the song cycle, which is quoted directly from the Temple of the Healing Eyes’ tourist brochure. Somehow the slight shift in grammar creates a small gap, a fissure into which meaning might slip unexpectedly.

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