Jonathon Crompton – Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt

Australian alto saxophonist and composer Jonathon Crompton presents Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt.

THE AUSTRALIAN CANTATAS
In his Australian Cantatas, of which Cantata No. 1: An Island Seen and Felt is the first, Crompton hones his diverse musical influences into a series of focused portraits that celebrate his homeland. These are the affectionate reflections of an expat; at the time of the series’s inception, Crompton had been living abroad for over a decade. The title of the first cantata is taken from Australian author Tim Winton’s 2015 memoir Island Home, in which Winton conveys a sentiment that is the central thrust of the cantata series: “Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me which is every bit as geological as family. Like many Australians, I feel this tectonic grind—call it a familial ache—most keenly when abroad.” The Australian Cantatas thus thematize displacement, homesickness, the joy and revelry of cherished memories, and nostalgia for place, via Crompton’s remembrances of his childhood in Australian country.

Cantatas are a genre developed in the churches of western Europe and date roughly from the seventeenth century. They can be reduced to four central characteristics on account of which Crompton felt they were appropriate conceptual models to shape his memories. First, in our own time, cantatas carry residual spiritual connotations from their once-central role in church services; spending time in Australian country was, and remains, a profoundly spiritual experience for Crompton. Second, cantatas usually had a plot, image, or narrative, suiting Crompton’s programmatic bent in the series. Third, they included singing and instruments during a time when instruments in European churches were quite novel—indeed, cantatas were something of an eclectic, technicolor, multimedia extravaganza for Baroque church goers, and Crompton’s approach to the series emphatically embraces the eclecticism of his influences. Finally, cantatas tended to be multi-movement works, with each movement having a discrete character and affect, an attribute that Crompton very much taps into as he explores the various shades of each landscape.