Solo works by Raymond Chapman Smith

As co-director of new music organization The Firm, Raymond Chapman Smith has quietly presented over 130 concerts of new music. But his uncomplicated disinterest in recognition or recording means his music is rarely heard beyond the walls of Adelaide's Elder Hall, where The Firm's annual concert series is presented to a regular audience of 50-100 initiates. This is the first album of his work, played by US born Australian-Iranian pianist Amir Farid.

On Ländler from 2002, Chapman Smith says: "The references, the paying of homage to Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Mahler, Wolf, and Zemlinsky are so obvious as to hardly need comment. They are heard through lenses polished by a later, more reductive aesthetic and a somewhat fortuitous arrival at a kind of diatonic serialism."

Of 2003's Nachschriften: "Some of my thoughts while making this music revolved around a passage from a speech which Paul Celan gave in 1958. Celan, of course, was speaking of lyric poetry but I would respectfully paraphrase his words as follows ... 'Music is not timeless. Certainly, it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time -- through it, not above or beyond it. Music, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the -- not always greatly hopeful -- belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Music in this sense too is underway: it is a making toward something. Toward what? Toward something standing open, occupiable, perhaps towards an addressable Thou, toward an addressable reality.'"

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