DREAMING IN THE SAND
Bentley String Quintet
Move Records MCD 620
It's hard to get a handle on this newly-recorded work. Robbie James is an unknown to me. although he has a listing in the Australian Music Centre files and he's well-documented on web spaces like Facebook, Linkedin, YouTube and he clearly has a firm guitar-based relationship with the group GANGgajang and was at one time a member of the Yothu Yindi personnel. For all that, you won't find much material about the composer and what material there is on internet sources is repetitious and not very informative.
Matters are complicated by the official data on his works at the AMC. For one thing, this particular disc is not mentioned, but four other string quintets are. First off is one from 1999 called Suzannah, which follows a female First Fleet convict who, at the work's end, is left 'dreaming in the sand.' Next came Kangaroo in 2003 which gives you the animals' view of the arrival of Governor Phillip in 1788. No. 3, as listed at the AMC, bears the title of The Dreamt World and dates from 2016. And finally - and somewhat confusingly - we come to String Quintet No. 4 which was produced in 2009. This is entitled The Marree Sisters and follows the paths of a mother and her four daughters who leave the small eponymous town at the fundament of the Oodnadatta and Birdsville Tracks to find new lives in Adelaide; these women are/were the composer's own relatives.
So far, so fair. The out-of-sequence dates for the later two works isn't that important. What is perplexing to those of us unfamiliar with James' compositional trajectory comes with the constituents of this third quintet. The work begins and ends with Dreaming in the Sand tracks, which generic title is meant (I think) to cover all of these compositions. Then we encounter a Kangaroo movement, which could be the first movement of Quintet No 2. A little later, we arrive at Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies and The Gentle Warrior, which are the fourth and third movements of this same quintet.
Track 3 is called Ghost on the Beach which, as near as I can tell, refers to the conclusion of String Quartet No. 1. Suzannah Sails is a definite reference to the same piece. Dance on the Divide was the original conclusion to the first live performance of Dreaming in the Sand in 2021, while The Crow and the Irishman (this CD's penultimate track) appears to have no precedent, although James does refer to his use of Irish folk music in the Suzannah work.
So what do we glean from all this? You'd have to assume that the format of this (perhaps) new String Quintet No. 3 uses material from its predecessors. Or possibly the composer has re-assessed his previous efforts and recast them. We'll probably never know because no recordings of the first two quintets are extant. We do know that the String Quintets 1, 2 and 3 all enjoyed their first performances on October 15, 2021 during Brisbane's Restrung Festival; The Maree Sisters has been recorded by he ABC on July 29, 2022 and recorded by the Bentley String Quintet. This ensemble has changed somewhat over the years but its surviving members are cellist Danielle Bentley and double bass Chloe Ann Williamson. The upper lines on this latest Move product are Camille Barry (violin 1), Eugenie Costello-Shaw (violin 2) and Charlotte Burbrook de Vere (viola).
String Quintet No. 3 has nine movements, as detailed above. The work lasts for 31'44" which gives us an average length per movement of about three-and-a-half minutes, so the aim is non-developmental in the usual sense. Nothing lasts long; the sketches of colonial/aboriginal/natural scenes make their presence known and are gone. The problem that the work faces is that very little of it is memorable; pleasant enough music-making, certainly, but nothing to challenge, astound, delight, pr arouse. It's not a half-hour that you grudge but I can't go along with those commentators who find profundity or insight in these old-fashioned vignettes.
According to what I can glean from the available online sources, Robbie James is an auto-didact (according to the Australian Music Centre) as far as serious composition goes. Which is fine and not that unusual if you accept the claims of several writers who claim that they gained nothing from their teachers. What you have to do if you teach yourself is to work twice as hard so as to make up for what nobody tells you, and that's why this quintet strikes you as well-intentioned but diffuse. Not that James should have taken to studying his Boccherini and Dvorak; who wants to offer interference? But writing without an awareness of what precedes you is to put huge trust in yourself and your capabilities.
James' first track, Dancing in the Sand (part one), opens with a single diatonic line, joined by two other instruments; then the rest emerge into a nice harmonic mesh of no complexity. Another scrap emerges on the violin, is repeated, then supported in a restatement by underpinning sustained notes. It's a nice tune that doesn't venture outside a simple scale format. We get an antiphonal response from the lower strings, then another collegial chorale before an abrupt change where the lower strings provide a hefty chugging underpinning for a few bars, before a reversion to the pervading placidity and a final statement of the movement's tune.
So what we have is statement and restatement, a touch of shared labour/melodic responsibility, but nothing that would befuddle any 18th century composer. It's hard to se a contour to these pages; you get restatements and a harmonic scheme that would have been unremarkable in the early Renaissance. And that's where auto-didacticism comes unstuck because, if you don't know what's been happening in Western (string quintet) music over the past 300 years, where is your edge?
Kangaroo is an improvement, chiefly because it sets up a mobile rhythm that keeps going until a restrained final page or so. The melodies employed are busy but come one after the other with little distinction. What this segment relies on is a three-note rhythmic figure that attracts more attention than anything else. To be fair, James' vocabulary here moves up a notch in richness with some piquant added notes. When the composer introduces a few irregularities about a third of the way through, you are pleased, even if the performance level is ragged. But the movement might just as well have been called Magpie or Indian Mynah for all the suggestiveness you receive of the titular animal's motion or natural standing.
Ghost on the Beach is a slow benevolent lament, I suppose, although for what I can't imagine; the coming of the white man? There's nothing supernatural about its colour or emotional landscape as it moves between chords that support a violin line which weaves a long contour holding no surprises. Beginning with a perky jauntiness, Kangaroo Rides the Desert Skies calms down to a hymn-tune and follows a stately path to its ambiguous conclusion; less of the wilderness here and more of a European concept of Heaven.
Who is The Gentle Warrior? Possibly the kangaroo because the movement comes from the quintet that deals with that animal. But no: it's an Aboriginal male that Suzannah is destined to encounter when she arrives in this new land. Again, the mode is upbeat and jaunty with a few passages of decent part-writing alongside others that are clumsy. The interest lies in the rhythmic patterns, although these are nothing to write home about, least of all in 2024. For a little over half its length Suzannah Sails states, restates and rehashes what sounds like a British Isles folk song; the polyphonic interplay is unsophisticated and the movement's progress stops after some semiquaver flurries a little over half-way through before James embarks on another melody. But then I'm not sure whether this melody leads anywhere as later focus falls on a figure that seemed to be an accompaniment provided by the cello.
This is a reversion to the simple diatonic writing of the first movement; not that the language ever got far beyond such a happy state. Nothing novel emerges in that regard during Dance on the Divide which sounds like a hoe-down, especially when the movement forward drifts into some elementary syncopation. I think I counted about five tunes being announced but can't be sure because they merged into each other and the basic key didn't change - apart from a couple of try-hard momentary modulations near the end. Still, it was cheerful in character.
As is The Crow and the Irishman which boasts a melody line with some Celtic suggestions, although nothing you could definitely hang your hat on. In essence, it is a cross between a minuet and a waltz, graced with some excellent doubling of a subsidiary chain a little before its somewhat lopsided conclusion; I mean, it stops but not exactly on the note that formed part of your mental projection. Dreaming in the Sand (part two), the longest track, begins with a couple of solo violin scraps before we enter into some full-bodied chords and move along our predictable path where the composer seems to be trying a few devices out but coming back inevitably to harmonization exercises.
You could look on this composition as an exercise in naivete. The stated attempt behind the exercise is a symbiosis of two cultures: an imposed white one and a pre-existing Aboriginal one. The trouble is that you look in vain for any traces of the latter; whatever the dreaming that is going in this particular sand is firmly based in a none-too-advanced European vocabulary, not helped by the fact that the only 'other' string production technique employed throughout is pizzicato. For all its aspirations, this quintet remains a divertissement; to get beyond this level, you simply have to have compositional technique - information and knowledge about the craft as it is practised today.
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