Greenbaum, Stuart (b. 1966) – The year without a summer

“Landscapes” Program note

The year without a summer

i. 1815 – and then the sky was filled with ash

ii. 1816 – the year without a summer

Stuart Greenbaum grew up in Melbourne, Victoria. He studied with Brenton Broadstock and Barry Conyngham at the University of Melbourne, and is currently Professor and Head of Composition at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Greenbaum has a catalogue of over 200 concert works across a wide range of genres, including five works for piano trio. His style, while grounded in classical tradition, has overt links to jazz, pop and minimalism.

The year without a summer was written in 2009, and was commissioned as part of the Trans-Tasman Composer Exchange between the Australian Music Centre and its New Zealand Counterpart, SOUNZ. This work was composed in a collaboration with the NZTrio, who premiered the work in Hamilton and Auckland in 2010. The work is inspired by the eruption of Mt Tambora on the island of Sambawa, Indonesia, on 11 April 1815. This event was the largest known volcanic eruption in that millennium, and besides the local, immediate devastation and loss of life, it sent an ash/sulphur cloud high into the atmosphere, which eventually spread across the globe, causing global temperatures to drop between 0.5-1 degree Celsius, exacerbating the effects of the end of the ‘Little Ice Age’. The effects on human civilisation in the northern hemisphere were profound – summer temperatures were the coldest on record for that century, causing crops to fail and subsequent widespread famine and food shortages. There were massive floods in China and India due to the disruption of the monsoon. Malnutrition and weather conditions also gave rise to outbreaks of disease, such as cholera and typhus. The crop failures sparked mass migration in the USA to the northwest territories, and contributed to the establishment of Indiana and Illinois. In Switzerland, a gloomy wet summer by Lake Geneva inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Lord Byron’s poem Darkness.

The first movement, 1815 – and then the sky was filled with ash was intended by Greenbaum to ‘ignite an atmosphere of apprehension – the approaching volcanic cloud – and to maintain this energy throughout.’ The opening tutti unison repeated notes give way to constant falling scales under a melody passed between the strings. The middle section features fragments of the opening tutti, initially over strongly rhythmic piano chords, and then more quietly, alternating with the scale figure. After some extended technique use in the piano under a rhythmic ostinato in the strings, the scalic texture comes back fortissimo, eventually leading to a massive, thundering close left vibrating in the piano. The second movement, 1816 – the year without a summer, begins with a solo cello line emerging out of the piano vibrations, eventually joined by the violin in the first rendition of the ‘cantilena’ theme. Alternations of the cantilena theme, and the piano theme introduced a few bars later, form the structural framework of the movement, as the themes are developed and explored across a range of keys. The movement little by little builds in intensity and drama towards an fff climax, which gives way to a stilted conversation between the violin and cello. The cantilena re-emerges, with the drama threatening to build again, however it subsides into the postlude, which draws on smaller and smaller fragments of the piano theme, until it is just a harmonised, falling minor-third gesture from the cello’s opening, like the intake and exhale of a breath – here representing, according to Greenbaum, ‘the final ebbing away of life – perhaps the last stages of starvation wreaked by the ensuing famine of 1816.’