Columns of Rain
for soprano, piano, cello and
flute (1989)
duration: 10’
text by Ross Baglin
GRT • 007
score available from
Australian Music Centre
author's note
Antonio Gramsci
was born in Ghilarza, near Sardinia, in 1891. As General
Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, he was arrested
in 1926 on the orders of Mussolini. During his 11 years in
prison, he secretly filled hundreds of notebooks with his
reflections on history, politics, philosophy and culture;
notebooks which are now recognized as central readings of
modern political culture.
During his years in prison, Gramsci was physically consumed
by the nervous and vascular diseases to which he had been
prone since childhood. Exacerbating these torments, his
wife Julia was committed to an asylum for the mentally ill
in Moscow in 1927. Julia had importuned Gramsci to leave
Turin during the weeks of escalated repression which
preceded his arrest and Gramsci interpreted her breakdown
as a response to his refusal of her importunings.
Gramsci's letters to Julia remain one of the great
achievements of modern Italian literature. Hard, passionate
and lyrical, they embody the mental vigour and precision
which sustained him during the years of physical and
nervous decomposition. Columns of Rain
is written in imagination of
the circumstances which inspired these letters.
Ross Baglin
text
Now that the
moss dyes
The slate roofs across Ghilarza
The bees are building in the bell tower;
I wake where we once slept
Your lips traced within my breathing
I turn toward you like a sunflower.
Love is grass and cornflower
It's memory
It grows in the stone,
The flat white rose and the sloping sky
And all our violent science
Defeated dreams.
Yet do I hear your heels upon the
Palatine floor
The crackling crowds below the ancient city wall
A ringing kiss in a burning city, fire
Staining your skin, within these columns of
rain.
When mustard roads, limestone hills,
The blue moss deep in the burner
Have petrified all of the factory fires
Then we'll race to work past
The dawn rising on the water
The light so tall in the ivory skies.
Alert all night a globe sings
White and still
To the spearing nerve,
And the heart compels the blood's fountain fall;
The bees are building in
Ghilarza walls.
The worked wax cells that will all be
ruined
By the sightless vine seeking out the sun
On the broken tower with a Pisan bell
It questions the rain, the whisp'ring columns of rain.