Vivaldi’s Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons, 1723) is a landmark work of Western art music and the Baroque which, in its attempt to express nature, presaged developments in nineteenth-century Romantic music, and whose repeated figures created a precedent for twentieth-century Minimalism by the likes of Philip Glass and Louis Andriessen.

Aaron Wyatt’s commission for Australian Baroque reworks Vivaldi’s conceit of a suite of pieces alluding to the seasons, transposing them to Noongar boodjar. Wyatt principally draws on his own experience of growing up as a Noongar man on Wadjuk Country in Perth.

Vivaldi’s influence is mostly present in the structure of the ensemble, which consists entirely of bowed string instruments (eleven violins, four violas, two cellos, one bass), with one plucked-string instrument (the harpsichord), and thus is wholly defined by the lyrical, often soaring sound world of attacks and tremolos.

Australian Baroque: The Six Noongar Seasons. Photo supplied

The majority female ensemble, led by artistic director and soloist Helen Kruger, helped to create an onstage mood which seemed somehow very contemporary, and quite apart from that of many other Australian orchestras.

Vivaldi’s approach was paralleled and updated through the commissioning of six introductory texts from Noongar songwriter and performer Gina Williams, which she read prior to each of the six movements, just as Vivaldi had worked with four associated poems.

Australian Baroque has posted an excellent video in which Wyatt explains how each of the movements relates to one of the distinctive six-part seasonal variations that the Indigenous inhabitants of the Southwest have long recognised. These seasons are Birak (rising heat and fire season of December/January), Bunuru (the hottest part of the year in February/March, or, as Williams puts it, “we yearn for shade”), Djeran (the not-quite-Autumnal cooling of April/May, which “comes back like an old friend”), Makuru (time of cold, rain and staying close to campfires throughout June/July), Djilba (mild weather and wildflowers of August/September) and finally Kambarang (return of more pleasant heat in October/November when, according to Williams, “the earth sings”).

Australian Baroque: The Six Noongar Seasons. Photo supplied

Unless one has memorised Wyatt’s explication in advance, much of the relationship between seasonal occurrences, Williams’ texts and the music remains difficult to discern. “Chromatic” and “fast semiquaver passages” represent “the winds howling” and “cold rains” of Makuru, alternating with “beautiful warm passages” from “the campfire”, and, given these correspondences tally closely with well-established Romantic approaches, they were easy to hear in the music.

The joyous quality of Kambarang, echoing as it does Vivaldi’s slightly restrained bounciness in La primavera (Spring), is also easily discernible and made for a joyous conclusion to the evening. Otherwise, one listens more to abstract sonic developments, including a mildly folk-meets-contemporary-classical feel reminiscent of Aaron Copland’s attempts to compose similar nationally specific works in the US, as well as Wyatt’s mildly insistent repeated sections, recalling those of Andriessen.

Wyatt and Australian Baroque are in this respect productively grappling with a fundamental question facing orchestras and art music ensembles in Australia: how does one translate Australian Indigenous knowledges into musical form without it sounding like a watered-down version of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913)?

There are no simple answers to this question, but for settler-descent Australians such as myself, grappling with what it means to live on conquered lands, this response from artists Wyatt, Williams and Kruger is invigorating and provocative.