All my life I have been fascinated by the interaction of science and art, especially with music. In an age where art music seems to have been relegated to the area of palliative care by "market forces", the uncompromising approach of some composers still willing to embrace science and the natural world seems to me very much in the spirit of the Enlightenment: to oppose the monolithic hegemonies of church, state and ideology, and instead fight for pluralism and individual freedom, to think for oneself, and to pursue one's curiosity.

Martin Friedel is one such composer - a trained scientist, he is also one of the few Australian composers able to earn his living purely from composing. His School pieces are brief but compelling snapshots of discoveries unimaginable without the Enlightenment. Stars and our relationship to nature are the undercurrents of Graham Hair's 3 extant transcendental etudes. Douglas Knehans' Boyd Panels were written at Bundanon, and conjure up the stillness, diversity and playfulness of the natural world, so breathtakingly evident in the Shoalhaven area of New South Wales. The failure of the Biosphere project is a reminder of how reliant we are on millions of other species for our survival on Earth, and in Australia this species diversity is increasingly only possible through private oases like Bundanon. Surreal images of nature like Boyd's crucified trees link in my mind to Paredes' Triptico, where the Calligram, or beautiful symbol, could be the intricate equations of string theory, or A Contra Luz, against the light, could represent the bending of light by gravity.

This makes Coruscations an appropriate inclusion, especially as the recent explanation for the Auroras surrounding the earth are "magnetic reconnections", the result of magnetic field lines colliding and releasing large amounts of kinetic energy towards earth. I grew up with an expectation of a lifetime pursuit of music which was propelled by the idea of the end of posterity. The awe-inspiring scale of such cosmic forces makes human hubris seem pitifully trite, yet makes human creativity and love seem all the more endearingly mysterious. - Michael Kieran Harvey

Interference pattern (Martin Friedel) download

Shoalhaven Light (Douglas Knehans) download

Coruscations (Richard Meale) download

Martin Friedel (b.1945)
The School of Natural Philosophy
1 The refraction of light
2 Descarte's space
3 Gravitational attraction
4 Interference pattern
5 Brownian motion
6 The ether rings
7 Minkowski's Weltlinie
8 De Broglie's wave
9 The wave equation
10 and one of its solutions
11 Heavy water
12 Schrädinger's cat

Graham Hair (b.1943)
Trancendental concert studies on themes
from the Australian poets
13 Under Aldebaran
14 Wild cherries and honeycomb
15 Dances and devilment and sunlit airs

Douglas Knehans (b.1957)
Boyd Panels
16 Meditation at Pulpit Rock
17 Crucifixion and rose
18 Shoalhaven light
19 The magic fish
20 Black river

Hilda Paredes (b.1957)
Triptico
21 Caligrama
22 A contraluz
23 Parábola

Richard Meale (b.1932)
arr. Michael Kieran Harvey (b.1961)
24 Coruscations