Hollier's career has encompassed a number of activities, all of them impinging on his compositional approach to the piano. He is a concert organist as well as a concert pianist; he has written for the theatre and directed opera; he has conducted, including oratorios; he has toured as an accompanist and has had a long and distinguished career as a teacher. An altogether flamboyant personality has merged all these activities in his music for the piano.
Returning to Australia from England in the 1960s after completing a Doctorate at the University of London, Hollier represents an interesting amalgamation of academic and experimental thinking; his performance background imbues his music with the freedoms learnt from early music ornamentation and romantic music’s rubato and soloistic cadenza. Eventually this led him towards various types of controlled aleatoricism. Thus, it is not untypical to find, in the same piece, strict fugue and mirror fugue combined with great freedom of notes and structure including some measure of improvisation. This last no doubt comes from Hollier's organ practice, probably the only classical instrument on which improvisation is still taught today. The resultant mix of very strict and free is what gives Hollier's music its special flavour and grand dramatic gesture.
The actual appearance of a Hollier score is the first impression one gets. Many of the larger works are also written in a format that demands large size paper, given the system of notation. This works against the composer, as the scores become difficult to reproduce, carry around, and even place on a music stand.
The presentation of the scores possibly has an effect on the potential number of
performances. Generally, Hollier prefers to rule his own paper and set out the page exactly as it suits him. The visual impact of his scores has some connection, I feel, with his theatrical flair and sense of the dramatic.
This kind of impracticality illustrates some of the immediate problems of approaching a Hollier score. It is possible that some of the music, at least, could be presented in a different way in print, but so far, almost all of it is still in manuscript form.
Like Burnard, Hollier comes from the English tradition and prides himself in his abilities to harmonize chorales, write fugues and canons and subject music to his keenly critical gaze. He favours set forms, or invents new forms to suit himself.
His harmonic language, often wild and unrestrained, is perhaps best demonstrated in his cycle of Sonnets for piano.
Ex 22:2 D. Hollier. Sonnet No. 6. opening.
The required pianism is of a virtuosic order:
Ex 23:2 D. Hollier. Sonnet No.4. opening.
The difficulties are not merely motoric or those of learning an often dense, chromatically saturated score. They also involve the ability to use all three pedals skillfully, to learn to play on the keyboard and inside the grand piano sometimes simultaneously, to juggle and superimpose different tempi and moods, to gauge the silences, to make informed choices when they are asked for
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to create a viable structure for the listener to follow and last but certainly not least, to understand the raw emotion driving these pieces.
The cycle of Sonnets for piano are probably the most important set of pieces so far produced in this country, for their extensive and consistently imaginative use of the instrument, the huge range of emotions displayed and the wedding of sound and intent. They represent the elements of Hollier's personalities (I use the plural deliberately) in their most successful exposition. The Sonnets, like Shakespeare's, are very personal utterances directed at specific but unknown people (Oral History interview NLA). I have provided the dates of composition as they appear on the manuscripts. They give some indication of the white heat at which these works were written. The plan of the cycle is:
SONNET I: August-January '76-'77
The cycle opens ominously and dramatically with constant shifts between fragments marked Mesto and Scherzo. The Mesto fragments ask for controlled rise and fall of dynamics within repeated notes or chords, creating an atmosphere of slow and hypnotic chant. There is also some choice allowed as to order of events. The contrasts are extreme.
SONNET II. (Spring '62). June 1976. For Keith
The date of composition is the second date. The first refers to events.
The performing direction is Molto Appassionate. The left hand is utilized throughout to play up/down quasi arpeggio patterns, giving a turbulent undercurrent to the whole sonnet.
SONNET III (the manuscript mistakenly has 'sonata' not sonnet). August-January '76-'77
Features a Tranquillo Quasi Chorale at the end. Again, choices on the spokes of wheels. Hollier writes here : "start anywhere and proceed in any direction. Play only once". This leaves open some ambiguity in other Sonnets with similar wheel layouts - that is, is it permissible to play more than once? This Sonnet features strumming chords inside the piano, like in Henry Cowell's Aeolian Harp.
SONNET IV. 15/8/76
One of the more difficult of the series, with frequent markings such as 'Frenetic' and 'Violent'. Consistently non-legato, this also contains a gesture at the end that the composer wants repeated fourteen times! It is marked 'sinister'. Hollier adopts the most simple notation that he can in terms of the durations of the notes, allowing, throughout the cycle, the many gaps between gestures to constantly play with the perception of beats and time.
SONNET V. (Summer '48). 25/8/76.
The date of composition is the second one. Pianist is asked to play 'Very intense but always hushed'. This is the most atomized of the
series, with long silences. Hollier destroys the mood at the end with a violent outburst. The long succession of low chords has each to be held until it disappears into silence.
SONNET VI. 25/8/76. SONG OF RESIGNATION.
Juxtaposition of varying tempi. Some passages consist of the simultaneous and rapid sounding of passages with its own inversion.
Strumming and keyboard playing combined. (Hollier is tall and has long arms, and so to him such a request does not sound in any way excessive! But I stress it is all eminently possible).
SONNET VII. 18/7/75
The score consists of three blocks of events marked A, B and C.
Instructions are: "A, B, C may be played in any order. D (which in the score is a blank block with four 'spokes') is the recapitualtion of A or B or C. The sentences within each box may also be played in any order.
But no sentence should be repeated.” A 12-note chord that appears in other Sonnets is here caught on the third pedal. It is possible that the pitch choices have some symbolic meaning.
SONNET VIII. 24/7/75. AUTUMN '75
Order of events is fixed. A combination of notes played on the keyboard with notes plucked inside the piano. Third pedal is used to sustain a 12-note chord throughout the piece. Most durations are rhapsodically free.
SONNET IX. 235/5/75
This is a continuous piece which the composer asks to be played "as rapidly and quietly as possible with both pedals down. The score is arranged like a giant wheel and the player has a choice as to which fragment comes first and then whether to move clockwise or anticlockwise. There is a violent coda at the close.
SONNET X. August '76-January '77.
This is marked 'Monotonous'. The player is given some choice for a series of end-gestures described as 'refrains' and is asked to pick which refrains are heard. As the title might suggest, this is predominantly made up of slow chords.
SONNET XI. Winter '59-'59. June-January '76-'77.
The second date is the date of composition. The first must refer to the date of events in the composer's life.
The sonnet is marked Molto Appasionate. A powerful, relentless piece, the left hand of which provides a constant and inexorable drum beat using black and white note glissandi in the lowest reaches of the piano.
The huge score is divided into time spans marked by the funereal beat of the left hand, within which the right hand plays at consistently high
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intensity. This sonnet is played all on the keyboard in the conventional manner.
SONNET XII. January 1977.
The heading is 'Desolate'. Most of the Sonnet is arpeggiated patterns with controlled up/down dynamics and silences, giving an overwhelming sensation of sighing passages. As once before, Hollier tends to destroy any feeling of peace or tranquility with a powerful succession of very loud chords at the end.
It should be said that what might first sound like gimmickry – the plucking of notes, the glissandi inside the piano, the big clusters, even the visual impact of the huge score soon settles down into 'normal' acceptable language and one is then free to immerse oneself in the actual musical world of these pieces.
Because structurally the Sonnets are by their nature fragmentary, it requires a performer to cope with this plethora of beginnings and endings by varying the length of the gaps and building these silences into the fabric of the works. It is only when the fragments are allowed to begin to sound predictable in length and in duration of the breaks between them that the cycle could falter. The whole huge edifice of the Sonnets is predicated on a violent rhapsodism in which consistent but controlled structural freedoms predominate and give a unifying voice.
They are heavily emotional works, charged with outbursts of energy. It is of course possible to play individual Sonnets, or a number of them as a bracket, but the huge impact of the cycle can only be experienced by a complete performance of the whole work. The visual appearance of the Sonnets on paper only confirms the aural impression, but Donald's presentation of the Sonnets on out-size paper has mitigated against them becoming better known. It seems to me that much of the music could be typeset in a more accessible way on ordinary sized paper and presented to the public anew; perhaps now is the time for this to occur; perhaps the presentation in the way the composer chose was part of the ethos of the then avant-garde and is no longer vital today?
Since much of Hollier's orientation as a musician has to do with the human voice (even the use of the title Sonnets), the cantabile aspect of writing for the piano is ever present:
Ex 24:2 D. Hollier. Sonnet No.3. opening of Quasi Chorale section.
The Sonatina for piano (1971) is a much more accessible and lighthearted piece, in the traditional three movement format, and although there are some aspects of serialism, everything is treated lightly and with humour, includes such – by now – well-worn techniques as plucking the piano strings and wedging keys down to create sympathetic resonance. This short work, although not easy, is nevertheless an excellent introduction to techniques of the time; it is an effective concert work, and an almost essential stepping stone to the much darker world of the Sonnets.
Other works for solo piano by this composer were not available to us at the time of writing this book. Some of these works may be lost.