Quito - press and listeners' comments

"... lacerating honesty and great beauty"






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press:
American Record Guide, May 1 1998
The Alberta NEW MUSIC & ARTS REVIEW (Canada), Vol. I No. 2, pp.110-112 (forthcoming)
David Vance, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 13 1998
Roger Covell, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept 15-21 1997
Martin Buzacott, 24 Hours magazine (Australia), Dec 1997
Kieran Dwyer, Matebian News, Sydney, March-April 1997
Brian Chiko, Schizophrenia News Update - Issue #73, Dec 17 1997
David Gyger, Opera~Opera, Sept 1998, p249.23
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listeners:
Canberra listener to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997
one of the singers on the CD
Timorese listener in Darwin to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997
Queensland listener to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997
English East Timor activist, June 6 1997
a listener to the CD, New South Wales, July 22 1997
a friend, Jan 18 1998



"This is a disturbing, chilling, spine-shivering work ..."

Diederik De Jong, American Record Guide, May 1 1998:

Like the musical-theatre work Boojum, reviewed most favorably in Nov/Dec 1993, the 52-minute Quito is a joint effort by Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith (b.1945) and his twin brother Peter, who wrote the book and lyrics.

Quito is called "a documentary music drama about schizophrenia and East Timor" and is summarized as follows: Quito concerns the life and death of Francisco Baptista Pires, a young East Timor-born Darwin man who suffered from schizophrenia. He was nicknamed Quito (pronounced Keetoh). In 1987 he was shot through the throat by police in a domestic disturbance. Three years later he was found hanging from his pajama cord in Royal Darwin Hospital. Pires was accused of shooting a policeman and, ironically, died on the day prosecutors were filing for an acquittal. The authors have used the Quito character to expose widespread human rights violations after Indonesian troops invaded East Timor in 1975, unleashing an unspeakable 23-year reign of terror and brutality that has caused much suffering in East Timor, especially of the "emotionally and mentally disturbed people" of the former Dutch colony. These human rights violations were almost ignored by the western world, including the government of nearby Australia, which soft-pedaled the Indonesian invasion, turned a deaf ear to pleas for help by the East Timorese people, and all but ignored their plight.

The texts and lyrics of Quito were taken from a multitude of sources, including newspaper articles, interviews with East Timorese exiles, eyewitness reports, radio and television news broadcasts, Timorese poetry, books on schizophrenia, and Quito's own words and writings. A speech by President Clinton, in his own voice, about taking quick, decisive action in 1994 in Haiti, serves as a contrast to speeches by Australian prime ministers who took little action and talked out of both corners of their mouths. The music is a mixture of solo songs, some with a rock beat, electronic sounds, guitar and piano accompaniments, and ensemble singing by the six-member Song Company, with frequent voice-over or solo narration by male and female narrators. One song is based on the music and Latin words of Orlando di Lasso's 1566 motet Timor et Tremor. Background sounds include forest sounds, children laughing, young men playing soccer, people shouting, and a Timorese song, all recorded in East Timor. Tracks 20-25 contain six separate songs from Quito.

This is a disturbing, chilling, spine-shivering work to listen to. The spoken words and lyrics carry all the weight here, the sometimes dissonant singing by the Song Company is effective and dramatic, but not much of the music sticks in the mind. But then, I don't believe it was Wesley-Smith's intention to write "pretty", lyrical tunes. The sonics are clear and detailed, the performance expert. This release was of interest to me, a Dutch 1953 graduate in tropical agriculture who was slated to go to Indonesia as a coffee planter, but it may be too specialized for most readers.

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The Alberta NEW MUSIC & ARTS REVIEW, (Canada), Vol. I No. 2, Summer 1998/Spring 1999, pp.110-112:
QUITO

East Timor has not been in the news much. This once quiet and peaceful country, brutally invaded by Indonesia in 1975, subsequently turned into hell - thousands of innocent people have been slain, their rights suppressed, and their culture shattered. All for some obscure political reason - and oil.

And it is precisely this oil that has successfully prevented the so-called Western democracies, and Australia, East Timor's closest "democratic" neighbour, from undertaking any significant action. Australia's economy relies on East Timorese oil and, therefore, subsequent governments have been more than cautious when dealing with the "complex" issue of East Timor. The issue, as one Gareth Evans (Australia's one-time Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade) put it, "was so amicably resolved." Amicably, indeed, as East Timor is by far the worst case of genocide, in terms of proportions of the population, that has occurred this century. As often happens more and more among "democratic" politicians (see the Canadian Prime Minister's behaviour during and after the RCMP's brutal beatings and pepper spraying of anti-Suharto protesters in Vancouver), a hypocritical wishful thinking has assumed the role of truth.

Quito is a "documentary music drama" named after, and devoted to the memory of, an East Timorese refugee in Australia - reportedly a gentle and peaceful man who suffered from schizophrenia. At some point, assaulted by five Australian policemen and shot through the throat, he was charged with attempted murder! (One immediately thinks of such RCMP practices as "framing" innocent people for murders which they did not commit, or planting bombs in order to arrest "eco-terrorists," or of Canadian "peace keepers" in Somalia torturing and killing a boy for the fun of it). The charges against Quito, whose real name was Francisco Pires, were eventually dropped. But on the same day, without having yet learnt about the charges being dropped, Quito hung himself with his pyjama cord in Royal Darwin Hospital, where he had earlier been subjected to a tranquilising therapy (or perhaps "therapy" since no one would listen to his complaints concerning the horrible side-effects he suffered). Therefore, Quito can, and should, be looked upon as a universal double victim - a victim of his native country, and a victim of the country in which he chose to survive. The former induced fear and despair in him. The latter punished him for not being able to fully conform to its social standards.

Martin (composer) and Peter (writer) Wesley-Smith have given us a sonic portrait of Quito, and an image of his surroundings. The work itself is a stylistically striking, and profoundly disturbing, postmodern collage that includes quotes from Orlando di Lasso Timor et tremor (1566), Quito's own songs (which he recorded while already in Australia), comments by his immediate family and Fretilin freedom activists, radio and TV news pertaining to both tragedies (that of the East Timorese and that of Quito), as well as original music.

The "rhizomatic" character of Martin Wesley-Smith's sonic tapestry and Peter Wesley-Smith's text beautifully reflects the essence of the real-life drama: nothing is "logical" here, events occur at random, and there are more questions than answers. On a personal level, only pain remains clear and "tactile." On a social level, a specific, deepening schizophrenia.

The work is superbly put together. The phenomenal Song Company (ah, one would dream of such an ensemble in Canada!) - at ease with Renaissance as well as jazz, pop and avant-garde music - is the main performing force, to which the majority of the extremely variegated original material is assigned. Martin Wesley-Smith leads one's imagination through a sonic landscape full of allusions, cross-references, widely differentiated styles (he is fully capable of composing an excellent experimental work AND a splendid jazz or pop tune), and suddenly shifting textures - a truly "schizophrenic" narrative, a tour de force of contemporary audio art. Both authors succeeded in avoiding the almost inevitable emotional exaggeration. Though their political involvement and sympathies are clear, sound, and bluntly expressed, the overall ideological message is never predominant.

A masterpiece.

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David Vance, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 13 1998:
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND, BUT TIMOR'S HEART BEATS IN QUITO

The Song Company
Quito
Newtown Theatre, August 6 1998

Political and social issues have often found a powerful advocate in musical theatre, where an effective marriage of text, image and sound can reach beyond the specific and the immediate to the universal and the timeless.

Such is the case with Quito by Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith. The work deals with schizophrenia, which afflicts Quito, a mild young Timorese man who fled to Darwin from the Indonesian invasion in 1975. The personal tragedy of Quito - shot through the throat by police responding to a domestic row, later found hanged by a pyjama cord in a Darwin hospital - evokes a compelling pathos.

However, Quito's schizophrenia carries a significance beyond his individual plight: the illness becomes a potent metaphor for the political situation afflicting East Timor. Consequently, the work explores both histories in such a way that the two accounts resonate with a moving and disturbing intensity.

Much of the strength of Quito rests in the seamless integration of different elements: the many layers of meaning are reflected in the multi-layered collage of aural and visual effects, where prerecorded voices and electronic sounds mingle with solo and choral song (superbly delivered by the Song Company), while projected images in a series of graphic, documentary-like photographs fragment and disintegrate into thin air, evoking an unbearable fragility of life, individual and social.

Martin Wesley-Smith's music has never been far removed from political or social comment, and his gift for pastiche has served him well in adopting familiar styles, often (but not always) drawn from popular music, to ironic or satiric purposes.

In Quito he excels in this technique, but his purpose has more profound intentions: employing a Passion motet by di Lasso ("Timor et tremor") he puns with deadly seriousness on the Latin text, and thereby implies the fear and horror that lie ahead. Adopting an English text to the music of the motet, and absorbing blues inflections and elements of popular and traditional songs into its pristine 16th-century harmonic world, he can comment on the present in terms of the past. The view is not reassuring: fear remains, and Timor is not yet free.

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Music critic Roger Covell, CD Guide in The Guide, p10, The Sydney Morning Herald, Sept 15-21 1997:

WESLEY-SMITH: Quito (documentary music drama)
Song Company/instruments/Leech.
Tall Poppies TP111

Martin Wesley-Smith, one of the most talented of Australian composers, has long championed the cause of the people of East Timor in his works. In Quito, which he describes as a documentary music drama, he and his text-writing brother, Peter, tell the story of a young man named Francisco Baptista Pires, nicknamed Quito, who was born in Timor, shared horrific experiences in his homeland and developed schizophrenia while in exile in Darwin.

Northern Territory police shot Quito through the throat during a domestic disturbance and he was found hanged by his pyjama cord in Royal Darwin Hospital three years later, apparently on the very day that the prosecution, unknown to him, applied to drop charges against him.

Wesley-Smith's way of combining the press of lurid fact and the necessary distillation of the creative process is to adopt a radiophonic texture, vividly realised on this Tall Poppies disk. Reports of Quito's fate and personal comments about him lead into a version of a motet by the 16th-century composer Roland de Lassus in which the original words are subverted gradually by the credo of an official policy of diplomatic silence. Quito singing one of his own songs from a television report on his fate accompanies the soundtrack.

The Song Company, our leading professional vocal ensemble, conducted by Peter Leech, provides the compositional backbone of the piece with new or adapted material, sometimes accompanied, sometimes not. One of the composer's special assets here is his command of a light, slightly sentimental, rhythmically whimsical style of part-singing. Wesley- Smith achieves a special piquancy through the bright, seemingly cheerful musical organisation of words carrying an otherwise insupportable freight of raw feeling.

This is something quite extraordinary: a work which succeeds in using selective juxtaposition in arousing our indignation and pity and which does not seek the final reconciliation normally supplied by art. It is Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith's deliberate intention that the feelings aroused by this documentary drama should need the resolution of sympathetic action on the part of the listener. This is the kind of committed or engaged art so much discussed in years gone past and so rarely encountered.

Rating: **** (excellent)

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"... moving and disturbing intensity"


Martin Buzacott, 24 Hours magazine (Australia), December 1997, re the CD of Quito (p30):

While we're on the subject of stylistic inconsistency as artistic strength, I should also mention the new Tall Poppies recording (a co-production with ABC Radio) of Martin Wesley-Smith's Quito, which earlier this year won the Paul Lowin Award for a song cycle. Originally staged at the Sydney Metropolitan Opera in late 1994, it's captured here in a radiophonic adaptation featuring the Song Company.

The text by Peter Wesley-Smith deals with schizophrenia and East Timor, and documents the life of Francisco Baptista Pires. Known as Quito, Pires was an East Timorese Darwin resident who was shot by police during a domestic disturbance, and who was later found hanging by his pyjama cord in the Royal Darwin Hospital.

As one might expect from such a diverse tale, the music contains a bit of everything, with lavish helpings of television reportage thrown in as well. It's like a summary of the composer's career, with a few Wesley Three-style folky numbers, a bit of cock-rock, and then the more extreme sounds of the contemporary avant-garde. Sounds a hodge-podge but it's not.

With the Song Company under Peter Leech in fine vocal form, it becomes an unnerving, intensely dramatic pastiche which provides a salutary reminder that Timor remains an unresolved issue. It's quite an achievement, demonstrating through music and drama that Australia's responsibilities to the region must not be ignored. Chalk up another success for the estimable Tall Poppies.

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Kieran Dwyer, Matebian News, Sydney, March-April 1997:

The launch and release of Quito (on 14 May at the ABC Centre, Sydney) is a fine example of how the lives and suffering of the people of East Timor have touched and inspired people around the world. Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith have created a stunningly original music drama, which juxtaposes the tragic life and death of Francisco Baptista Pires (nicknamed Quito) who suffered from schizophrenia, with the wider story of East Timorese suffering after the Indonesian invasion of 1975.

The Wesley-Smiths comment: "Invasion. More than anything else, this is what this piece is about. The invasion of Quito's head by voices, of his body by drugs and a police bullet, and of his homeland by enemy troops ..."

Featuring the Sydney vocal ensemble The Song Company, who performed the original stage version in 1995, the sources for Quito are varied - some of Quito's own songs, a strange poem he wrote not long after he was shot and an essay he wrote at school, Xanana Gusmao's poem Timor Woman and extracts from eye witness reports by East Timorese survivors. Composer Martin Wesley-Smith has overlaid this work with voices of East Timorese community members (especially powerful is the traditional lament by Veronica Pereira), and the voices of international political leaders such as Bill Clinton and Gareth Evans, journalists' and medical reports.

Quito has been entered by the ABC in the 1997 Prix Italia, a major European broadcasting award.

With masterful writing for voices, the work is deeply haunting and beautiful. Resounding with passion, and a commitment to exploring aspects of life that others would turn blind eyes, deaf ears and silent mouths toward - Quito will touch you with its many emotional layers.

Publisher: East Timor Information Centre/CNRM with the support of ETRA (the East Timorese Relief Association: http://www.pactok.net.au/docs/et/).
Postal address: P.O. Box 991, Fairfield NSW 2165 tel: 61-2-98915861 fax: 61-2-98912876

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Brian Chiko, Schizophrenia News Update - Issue #73, December 17 1997:

The launch and release of Quito ... is a fine example of how the lives and suffering of the people of East Timor have touched and inspired people around the world. Martin and Peter Wesley-Smith have created a stunningly original music drama, which juxtaposes the tragic life and death of Francisco Baptista Pires (nicknamed Quito) who suffered from schizophrenia, with the wider story of East Timorese suffering after the Indonesian invasion of 1975.

[Schizophrenia News Update is a free periodic newsletter brought to you by http://www.schizophrenia.com]

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David Gyger, Opera~Opera, Sept 1998, p249.23:

"... this extraordinary and deeply felt work ..."

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"... a work of such passion, commitment and love. The real faces of the people (and voices) from East Timor are so deeply touching in a time where it is so easy to feel completely detached from other people's suffering"

from a Canberra listener to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997:
I listened and loved it. True, there are parts of it that CANNOT be loved - but it was wonderful. As usual I was blown away by your deft and masterful writing for voices - I was alarmed and moved and afraid ... by it: and quite compelled by the authority of your writing. Afterwards I must say I felt a grief I couldn't articulate: beyond Timor ... and beyond precarious and passionate mental ill-health - and I am still thinking about it all. Congratulations! It will have been heard and responded to by many people - you must be very proud of this work ... once again - congratulations on Quito - on its lacerating honesty and great beauty

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from one of the singers on the CD:
I've just finished listening to Quito and I'm very moved. It had a much bigger impact on me than I was expecting ... Of course I was eager to hear how everything was going to be linked together musically and I love it! Where you've used voice over with us singing behind it ... there is so much colour and meaning that it had an emotional impact of many layers for me. As a 'working' singer I often consider the impact (or lack of) what I do on other people and the value and meaning of the composition. It's inspiring for me to hear a work of such passion, commitment and love. The real faces of the people (and voices) from East Timor are so deeply touching in a time where it is so easy to feel completely detached from other people's suffering.

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from a Timorese listener in Darwin to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997:
It is a masterpiece of music. I cried my eyes out until no tears were left. I felt the tragedy of East Timor perforating my bones as I never felt before. I'm going to buy the CD.

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from a Timorese listener in Darwin to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997:
It is a masterpiece of music. I cried my eyes out until no tears were left. I felt the tragedy of East Timor perforating my bones as I never felt before. I'm going to buy the CD.

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from a Queensland listener to the ABC broadcast, May 6 1997:
... was both delighted and yet very moved by it, and can't wait for the CD in order to hear it again.

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from an East Timor activist, England, June 6 1997:
I received and listened to QUITO. Thankyou so much for sending it. And even more for the doing of it. I have been through many intense experiences through the story of East Timor and its remarkable people. This is one of those I shall most treasure and remember.

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from a listener to the CD, New South Wales, July 22 1997:
I can say in all honesty, as one with little knowledge of music, that what you have put together is ART to my way of thinking. The voices and music were beautiful, and the merging of politics with human emotions was very powerful. I intend to buy a few more copies of this CD to send to people I know will be moved by it also. It is a wonderful means of conveying a message ... I have read Anne Deveson's book Tell me I'm here and can relate to the trials and tribulations of families who have a child with problems of this kind ...

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from a friend, Jan 18 1998:
I heard (Quito) last week on the radio. I must confess that I was in the car, and without realising that it was your work, I pulled over to the side of the road to listen. I'm not sure how much of it I heard, but was totally mesmerised, teary and delighted. As the work shifted 'means' (documentary, song, anthropology ...), I was transported through the meaning of these systems of communication and had the pleasure of how you crafted it into one united work. Absolutely wonderful build up of overall meaning and attention to minute detail. Bla, bla, I could go on and indeed have thought about it often since then.

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"... the work is deeply haunting and beautiful. Resounding with passion, and a commitment to exploring aspects of life that others would turn blind eyes, deaf ears and silent mouths toward - Quito will touch you with its many emotional layers"

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