The Sounds Of Paradise

The Arts

Composer David Fanshawe’s quest to capture for posterity the vanishing music and natural sounds of the Pacific. By Laurie Strachan

Paradise, says David Fanshawe, (pictured at right) is a small island in the Pacific. Don’t ask him where it is though, because he won’t tell you. He isn’t even game to look at the pictures he took of it himself. “I took 80 reels of this one island and I’ve never opened the film parcel,” he says.

But what made him think it was Par adise? “It was right at the time,” says Fan shawe. “The question is what is Paradise? And Paradise is always chang ing. As one develops, as one goes through life, it is going to change.”

And will he be going back? “Never!” he says emphatically. “No. Never go back, al ways go on.”

That might be David Fanshawe’s credo always go on. For Fanshawe is an ex plorer. He has a bust of himself on the back window of his lounge room that says so: David Fanshawe, composer and explorer.

Of course, the word composer gives the game away, for David Fanshawe isn’t your standard explorer. He does draw maps, but they’re not the kind of maps you’d care to navigate with.

The world Fanshawe explores is the world of sound. Armed with two preci sion-built Swiss tape recorders, a bagful of expensive microphones, crates of tapes and the bare necessities of life, he sets out in pursuit of the noise of the world with the aim of bringing it back alive.

Mostly Fanshawe, an Englishman, rec ords music a sing-sing in the Sepik, a ceremony in Tahiti; but sometimes he tapes the sounds of nature itself, from the singing of the birds to the howling of a hurricane.

When he gets back home to Australia, he files these sounds away in his enormous collection where they wait to be called out if they are among the very few chosen ones to take their place in one of his compositions. That was how he created his famous and consistently popular “African Sanctus”, a strange, naive, powerful and passionate fusion of primitive African music with the rites and sounds of West ern Christianity.

A year or so ago Fanshawe emigrated with his wife Jane to Australia from Eng land to be closer to what is now the con suming passion of his life, the Pacific. He is working on a major new composition, “Pacific Odyssey”, which he hopes will eventually be performed by the Sydney Philharmonia Society. Originally he had intended having the piece ready for Aus

tralia’s Bicentennial but the death of the Philharmonia’s director Peter Seymour and his own serious illness halted that plan.

Now he thinks it may be ready in 1990 or 1991 but, he stresses, there’s no dead line. He still has some research to do when I spoke to him he was about to set off for New Zealand and a substantial libretto to write.

His home in Sydney is dominated by his enormous collection of recordings of the sounds of the Pacific more than 1,000 hours of high quality stereo. Fan shawe spent six years compiling this un matched collection of recordings all over the Pacific and there are copies in the Na tional Archives in Canberra and Fiji.

And in fact, though he is a successful composer with an ability to attract the general public, he sees his role as an archi vist as his most important contribution to music. “I’m very aware that what I am re cording is fast disappearing,” he says.

“Traditional forms of music in all the is lands are dying out or changing. The cus tom music they have had for centuries no longer has any valid reason for being there.

People are watching television seven hours a night and are not discussing their folk lore; oral traditions are not being handed down. “I wanted to collect this music and try to preserve it as best I could in its un influenced state and also to record the change in times.

“I collect very intuitively,” he adds. “I believe I have a talent for it. I get feelings about places and about people. I am led, often, by forces quite beyond my control.

I was led to all these places.”

Led he may be, but there is a lot of work to be done before he can get to his desti nation. He estimates that pre-planning takes up 90 per cent of his time, and re cording, “the fun part for me”, a mere 10 per cent.

And when he gets there, he is not con tent just to plonk down a microphone and switch the power on. He is proud of his techniques and, considering that these field recordings can be fed into high-pow ered amplification systems and commer cial recordings without any noticeable drop in quality, justly so.

“I use four microphones and I attempt to obtain a mix on the spot,” he says.

“Where I put the microphones is another reason why I think this collection is good.

The clarity and definition of the record ings, I like to feel, is good.”

He has every reason to believe that, for

a film documentary he co-produced about his travels, entitled “The Musical Mari ner”, won an Australian Film Institute award for Best Achievement in Sound, thanks to his work. The film is in two parts, the first of which was shown on Aus tralia’s ABC last year. The whole thing is booked for Britain’s BBC in April this year.

Fanshawe is determined to get the best recording possible, whether it involves stalking backwards across the Mt Hagen Showground before feather-bedecked highlanders or sitting quietly with a cou ple of microphones recording the chuckle of a mountain stream.

Fanshawe learnt composition at the Royal College of Music, and the basics of recording working as a trainee film editor in England in the late ’sos and early ’6os.

In 1966, he made his first visit to Africa.

That was the genesis of “African Sanctus”.

In 1969, he hitched-hiked down the Nile and in the following years travelled around much of eastern Africa. “Sanctus” was first performed in 1972.

He first came to the Pacific in 1978 on a reconnaissance trip and was immedi ately captivated by the sheer size and va riety of the region and its music. Since 1980 he has spent long periods travelling around the islands accumulating his 2000 tapes in a carefully-planned sweep through Poly nesia, Micronesia then Melanesia.

The tapes are his basic research mate rial for “Pacific Odyssey” which, he says, will be a “a choral, orchestral and ar chival work which will be a celebration of the Pacific, the islands as seen through my eyes as a composer who has travelled and has spent six years now recording in the islands.

“I felt it necessary to have that back ground knowledge before I could compose anything.”

The work will be scored for a large choir with soloists, mixed children’s choir and an instrumental ensemble of 21 featuring six french horns, trumpets, trombones, flutes, keyboards and a synthesiser plus highlights from the Pacific tapes.

The text, he says, will come from a va riety of sources. “It’s probably going to be taken from a biblical text allied with Pa cific writings English translations of traditional legends of the Pacific.

“This composition,” says David Fan shawe, “is ultimately a song of the uni verse; and if it isn’t good fun to sing and if it isn’t jolly good fun to listen to, then it isn’t worth the effort.” □