'Music is a way of reclaiming time': Behrouz Boochani's lauded memoir becomes a poetic musical event

Steve Dow

Sat 20 Mar 2021 06.00 AEDT

A little blond girl plays in the shallows at Christmas Island, oblivious to a tugboat filled with exhausted refugees pulling up to a pier for Australian government “processing” in the middle of the Indian Ocean. For Kurdish-Iranian asylum seeker and writer Behrouz Boochani, traumatised by nearly drowning at sea and still struggling to walk, this girl is “like the cool gentle breeze this sunny day”. She is his “first real impression of Australia”.

London-based Australian composer Luke Styles, who has created a song cycle out of Boochani’s critically lauded memoir No Friend But the Mountains, felt an affinity with the book’s striking image of the little girl because “the beach is so ingrained in us as Australians”. Using 1,280 of Boochani’s words as a libretto, the cycle will premiere in Melbourne on Sunday in a performance by the Zelman Memorial Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Bach Choir and bass baritone soloist Adrian Tamburini.

The cycle’s seventh song, about the little blond girl, begins with uplifting, lyrical singing accompanied by an attractive melody. But then the song lines become “infused with a very dark, dissonant harmony”, and percussive music takes hold, reflecting Boochani’s widely shared anger over the Australian government placing children in detention. “Where in the world do they take children captive and throw them inside a cage?” writes Boochani.

The song cycle follows the memoir’s trajectory: the first half is a sea odyssey, followed by a section dominated by a “weaving, dark line” of bass clarinet, tuba and low strings to accompany Boochani’s observations of the island prison. The work finishes by drawing on some of Boochani’s final philosophical lines and lamentations.

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