Deborah Cheetham Fraillon makes music as a first language
Composer Deborah Cheetham Fraillon gives dignity to both sides of her musical inheritance by bringing Western and Indigenous traditions together.
Deborah Cheetham Fraillon could well be the busiest composer in the country at the moment. Concertos, operas, choral and instrumental works have rushed from her like a musical torrent.
In Sydney on Monday night she heard the London Symphony Orchestra and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, under direction of conductor Simon Rattle, perform her acknowledgment of Gadigal country, an evocative union of music and language called Tarimi Nulay, or Long Time Living Here.
The following evening, also at the Opera House, was the premiere of her first ballet score, written for choreographer Daniel Riley’s new piece, The Hum.
Cheetham Fraillon, of the Yorta Yorta people, is the first female First Nations composer to be commissioned by the Australian Ballet. Conducting the performance in the Joan Sutherland Theatre was her new wife, Nicolette Fraillon, returning to the Australian Ballet where, until her retirement last year, she was music director for 20 years. The couple married in January and have settled in Sydney.
“It’s a real thrill to have my wife conducting my first ballet, but also for the dancers to be in her hands for these two new works,” Cheetham Fraillon says. “It takes the experience of someone like Nicolette to bring it all together.”
Cheetham Fraillon, 58, has emerged as a powerful voice in composition. She has taken the apparatus of Western classical music – its instruments and harmony – and imbued them with the beauty and spirit of First Nations languages. Her works give dignity to both sides of her musical inheritance. Listening to them, you can hear that reconciliation is not only possible, but could be wonderful. Along with other First Nations composers William Barton and Brenda Gifford, she is the source of an exciting new stream in contemporary classical music.
She wears several hats. As a soprano and composer, she founded Short Black Opera to provide tutoring and performance opportunities for First Nations singers and musicians. With the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra she has been composer in residence and is now First Nations Creative Chair. Earlier this year she was appointed the inaugural Elizabeth Todd Chair of Vocal Studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
She is herself a graduate of the Sydney Con and began her working life as a high school music teacher. And, in a sense, she has never stopped being an educator. One part of her mission is to bring audiences to a closer appreciation of First Nations cultures through music. The other is to open the doors of classical music institutions – the symphony orchestras, chamber groups, choruses and opera companies – for First Nations composers and musicians.
It may be that classical music is the last frontier for First Nations artists. In theatre, dance and rock music, for example, Indigenous artists have had considerable popular success.
But the long and expensive training required of singers and instrumentalists in the classical music world has meant that Indigenous students – with a few exceptions – often have not had the opportunity to thrive.
Cheetham Fraillon says she noticed the near absence of First Nations people when she started to receive commissions from symphony orchestras.
“There was not one First Nations person anywhere to be seen,” she says. “And knowing what the journey is as an orchestral musician – knowing how early it must start in life – I realised it was the next chapter of the Short Black Opera story. I needed to create programs that would support those young musicians who are starting on an orchestral instrument – and lots do – and keep that going. This is something that Short Black Opera has been doing for singers, now we must do it for instrumentalists.”
The chamber group she founded, Ensemble Dutala, has been doing just that. It is led by Aaron Wyatt, a violist and Noongar man from Perth (his father is Ken Wyatt, the former federal minister for Indigenous Australians), who for several years has been a casual musician with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Another initiative is the One Day in January program, a kind of music camp for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musicians. One of this year’s participants was young violinist Sandra Hart, a school student from Perth who has been part of WASO’s Crescendo music education program.
“It has always been about matching ability with opportunity,” Cheetham Fraillon says. “Those two things are out of step with each other for First Nations people. Plenty of ability, not so much opportunity – not in the classical music space at least.”
Cheetham Fraillon grew up in a white, churchgoing family in Sydney. She excelled at tennis and was a keen debater at school, but it was an outing to hear Joan Sutherland sing in The Merry Widow that convinced her she wanted to be an opera singer. She had won a place at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music but, having auditioned on piano and flute, switched to vocal studies on her first day there.
When she was in her early 20s, she had a life-changing experience. At the time, she was involved with a women’s theatre company and was touring with its show, Dykes on Parade, in Canberra.
“This night, when I stepped on to stage, there was someone (in the audience) who could have been my identical twin: that was a defining moment for me,” she says. “We met each other after the performance. The little information that I held about my Aboriginal family … was that I was related to Jimmy Little. This woman turned out to be my cousin. She introduced me to my aunt, and my aunt made it possible for me to meet my mother, Monica.”
Having believed she was abandoned at birth, Cheetham Fraillon learned she had been taken, and was a member of the Stolen Generations. Over the years she has met the members of her Aboriginal family, and she doesn’t pretend the journey has been short or easy. Music has been the constant in her life and it has helped her navigate her way into understanding her First Nations heritage.
“What’s really important in all of this is that music has underpinned the entire journey,” she says. “It’s been a long journey, and you can’t do it all at once. It does not come together neatly. Especially as an adult, who has other siblings and another family who raised you, and especially because I grew up with this misinformation, cruelly, that my mother had abandoned me. Only to find out that she hadn’t abandoned me at all, that I had been taken from her.”
Through composition, Cheetham Fraillon has brought First Nations stories and language into the concert hall, and her output has been astonishing. She sang in the premiere of her first opera, the first by an Indigenous composer, Pecan Summer, in 2010. She has written operas for children including Parrwang Lifts the Sky, and a choral work, Eumeralla: A War Requiem for Peace, that remembers the fallen in the frontier conflict between white settlers and the Gunditjmara people of Victoria.
For Australian embassies around the world she has written a collection of nine vocal pieces, each a response to tapestries of Indigenous artworks. Her concert works for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra include Nanyubak, a viola concerto with Aaron Wyatt as the soloist; Baparripna, a work for orchestra and didgeridoo featuring William Barton; and Dutala (Star-Filled Sky), a prelude to Beethoven’s ninth symphony.
She has also composed for the MSO a suite of acknowledgments of country, one for each of the nine main Indigenous nations where the orchestra performs. Similar to Tarimi Nulay, which she wrote for Gadigal country in Sydney, each of the short pieces is performed in language. Very often it is Cheetham Fraillon doing the singing.
“Language comes from the geography of place,” she says. “The coastal languages are so incredibly resonant. The interior languages are full of double and triple consonants and are incredibly rhythmic.
“I try to respond and put myself into that place, and – if there are people who speak the languages – to spend as much time with them as I can, knowing that I’m a guest. When I sing in the language of my grandmother, in the Yorta Yorta language, is when I feel possibly the most empowered because I am singing from a place of knowledge and belonging.”
Music, she says, has an important part to play in Australian reconciliation – “Music can say the things that could never be articulated through language” – and in the months leading up to the referendum on the voice. The voice, as proposed, is not the model she would have chosen: she would have preferred to “start again” than amend the existing Constitution. But the voice is a start and she says it must succeed.
“We have six months now to hear the arguments on both sides,” she says. “The argument against will be full of fear and hatred, it will be ugly, and I could do without that in my life. I’m just hoping that the argument for will be concise, and that there will be great clarity around it, so that when the Australian public casts its vote it will do so with confidence.”
Daniel Riley’s The Hum is one half of the Australian Ballet’s double bill called Identity, along with Alice Topp’s new work, Paragon. Cheetham Fraillon’s score for The Hum is a 50-minute piece, inspired by Riley’s ideas – a “ceremonial space” for performers, orchestra and audience – and by the kernels of choreography she gleaned from a workshop with dancers last year.
As she explains, she writes tonal music to which she gives a harmonic twist and rhythmic vitality. A difference between her ballet score and other compositions, she adds, is that this one does not involve a text. “It’s interesting – I set a lot of texts, my war requiem, my operas. This one, no text at all. But there is always language for me, behind every single score.”
She and Nicolette Fraillon met in Melbourne where Short Black Opera shared premises with Orchestra Victoria. Cheetham Fraillon was invited to give a talk to the orchestra about First Nations musical traditions. Over time, she and Fraillon realised they were meant to be together.
She has found in Fraillon “someone who has that depth of understanding of why we make music – and why we must. We have the same belief system about that,” she says.
“It is essential in our lives.”
The Australian Ballet’s Identity program is at the Sydney Opera House until May 20, and at Arts Centre Melbourne, June 16-24. Parrwang Lifts the Sky is at Arts Centre Melbourne, July 7-8.
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