In June 2025 Steel City Strings tour Anne Boyd’s string orchestra work Bencharong to Bowral, Wollongong, and Kiama (15-22 June). It appears as part of their Echoes programme, which also draws on music by Julian Yu and Andrián Pertout to explore the enriching influence of and dynamic interplay between Australian music and the cultures of their Asian neighbours.
A 15-minute work for an ensemble of 12 strings, Bencharong was commissioned by Musica Viva Australia for the Festival Strings of Lucerne and Rudolf Baumgartner, premiering as part of an Australian tour in 1977. Its title refers to a traditional type of Thai pottery, which translates literally as ‘five colours’, whose style is characterised by repetition of flowing motifs around the centre of a bowl and tense, monochromatic lines around rim, base and central panel – graceful, refined, and quiet.
This shapes the first part of the work’s mood, which knits together different groups of strings; a violently-contrasting second part of the piece though, however, found its emotional motivation in Boyd’s response to the violent events of the 1976 coup d'état in Thailand, which saw her appalled by the brutal treatment of young left-wing students and activists. In this way the piece identifies the tensions that underlie that poised ceramic work Boyd so admired. See a perusal score here.
It is one of numerous works in Boyd’s rich and varied output, spiritual and meditative in nature, and drawing heavily on East-Asian musical traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1970), reworked for 13 strings in 2002 for the Adelaide Festival, is inspired by the sound of the shō: the Japanese mouth-organ whose slow-moving chords provide a background sonority to the ancient gagaku music of the Japanese court. Her harmonies in the 10-minute piece are drawn from a whole-tone scale with some chromatic embellishment, and her progressions from one chord to the next evoke a gently-unfolding stillness.