Music
In his new album, Australian contemporary composer Jonathon Crompton explores memory and nostalgia through baroque-inspired improvisations. By Liam Heitmann-Ryce-LeMercier.
Jonathon Crompton’s Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt is a love letter to the Surf Coast
“The past,” as famously described in L. P. Hartley’s tale of lost innocence, The Go-Between, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
It remains an apt metaphor, given the capacity for travel guides or family photo albums to evoke an overpowering sense of mystery or strangeness.
The flexibility of memory can add a splendid gloss to past events or might erase them from recollection altogether. The relationship between past and present is always shifting. Australian composer Jonathon Crompton has lived in New York City since 2013, and his latest album is a deeply personal exploration of these complexities.
Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt, published by independent Melbourne-based label Amica Records, offers a hushed love letter to the Surf Coast of his childhood, a forested expanse of coastline 100 kilometres south-west of Melbourne. Written for alto saxophone, two sopranos and strings, with electric guitar by James Wengrow, the new work is a breathy, tremulous meditation on the shores of his native Victoria – as well as an exploration of the Australian landscape’s capacity to inspire and enthral.
Crompton remains keenly aware of the risks inherent within such an undertaking, given his station in the United States. He wisely avoids jingoistic flourishes that would explicitly road-map the musical journey on which he takes us.
The first movement – the longest of the three – briefly evokes the quivering growl of the didgeridoo, presenting frenetic quavers in the deeper registers of the cello that echo this uniquely Australian instrument. But that really informs the degree to which explicitly local textures infiltrate any part of this dreamy, largely ambient soundscape.
The first movement continues gently, gradually revealing a twisting bed of synthetic pattering like that of a telephone dial tone played in reverse. Soon after emerges the ponderous flicker of electric guitar. This unfurling of mysterious textures creates an effect of sunlight glimmering across the sea at sunrise, a dawning surge of soft energy that begins to enter its stride with the soulful gusts of Crompton’s alto saxophone.
Interweaving lines for twin sopranos emerge from the spiralling crests of sax, looping between one another in high, wordless threads. The absence of a libretto within Cantata No. 1 gives the work a pleasingly universal quality. Crompton communicates in the frolicking, spiralling lines for soprano a keen sense of coastal terrain and wayward air.
We return to ground level as the movement follows a descending line of cello strums and a delicate cluster of chords for electric guitar. The latter instrument is a particularly inspired choice, lending the work a casual, relaxed attitude fitting of the coastal mood Crompton evokes throughout. It’s also indicative of the American influences of the composer’s writing space, having penned the work in New York during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.
There are obvious echoes of American minimalist composer Steve Reich, whose own dreamy, propulsive work for steel guitar, Electric Counterpoint, informs the most recognisable source of inspiration in Cantata No. 1. More fitting a comparison, however, stems from John Adams’s Naïve and Sentimental Music. Inspired by the Sonoma coastline of northern California, the surrounding forestland of the American composer’s so-called “writing shed” informs much of the billowing, hesitant dynamism of the work’s long second movement. Notably, that movement is also scaffolded by the ambling presence of electric guitar, as with the Crompton composition.
Crompton distinguishes himself from the minimalist forefathers of his adopted American homeland in one profound way: the guitar lines of Cantata No. 1 are largely improvised, a decision he credits to his jazz background. In a novel artistic flourish, Crompton proceeds to fuse this free-form guitar with an intricate knowledge of renaissance counterpoint in his choice of the cantata style.
Tracing their roots back to the 17th century, cantatas arose from the halls of Western European churches, blending voice and instrumentation in a way that offered an unusually multi-sensory musical experience for the period. Today they carry vaguely spiritual connotations and it was here that Crompton found the most sensitive conductor for his reminiscences of Australia. It is a successful translation, with the oscillating energy of the electric guitar conveying a sense of the tingling ecstasy Crompton experienced when swimming in the ocean as a child.
The stand-out piece of the album comes in the third and final movement, having already dropped as a single ahead of the complete album’s release on May 23. Following the more amorphous, squirrelly clustering of twin soprano and high violin lines carried across the soaring second movement, the work finds its most secure and entrancing stride here. The decision to highlight the movement as a single release is a wise one, for it successfully captures the startling, gentle beauty of Crompton’s native Victoria.
It is here that the promise of the album’s title, An Island Seen and Felt, is fulfilled. Platformed by the slow back-and-forth sawing of violins, the electric guitar returns with hypnotic force after an absence in the second movement. It reverberates across the breezy soundscape like fragments of conversation drifting through corridors of memory. Amid this fibrous, misty texture rises the jubilant voice of the alto saxophone, a sunny upthrust of coiled energy. It proves a brief, unstable presence, reflective of the flimsiness of memory and the untrustworthy tint that childhood recollections adopt in later life.
The movement’s closing falter and final exhalation comes as the electric guitar dissipates across the expiring layers of violin. We are rolling to an end, the soundscape contracting inward as we reach a musical sunset. The light fades and the memories persist quietly in darkness with a final, triumphant guitar chord. It is a view of a country Crompton once knew and one that remains, from an enormous distance, an island seen and felt. And one that proves its worth as a spring of inspiration just as vital as anything from the American frontiers of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring or the Nordic vistas of Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 10, 2025 as "Landscapes of memory".
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