A conversation with fabulously idiosyncratic Lisa Gerard runs the gamut.
The award-singing singer and composer will take you into the mystical realm where she connects with her creativity, which allows her to sing in a language of her own invention; the heights of Hollywood success, where the Golden Globe winner and Grammy nominee has anecdotes about knocking back working with famed film score composer Hans Zimmer, and seeking life advice from Russell Crowe; and more quotidian topics, like the weather.
“The sun is shining. It’s an absolutely beautiful day here,” she says down the phone from her home studio in Drouin West, Gippsland, where our chat is the last of her media engagements for the day before doing a little more work for the world premiere of Immortal Diamond, her collaboration with Paul Grabowsky and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO).
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Gerard has previously performed concerts with Grabowsky, which they have always improvised. However, for Immortal Diamond, Grabowsky, an MSO Composer in Residence, has taken his inspiration from the final line of ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of Resurrection’, a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
“He wanted to do something that had a structure, that was about this poem,” she explains of the concert that is being performed for one night only next Wednesday, 5 October, as part of the MSO’s Metropolis New Music program.
“Now, the way I work is not like that,” she states. “I don’t have practicality in what I do, because when I make my work, it’s kept in an abstract reaction to the music itself so that the participants, which are the audience, have their own experience through not being given systemized information to tell them how to think. That’s why I use the abstract language that I use, which is unique for every piece of music that I sing, and it’s not ever exactly the same language,” she explains.
For Gerard, that language is innate within the music itself and her job is to find that intuitively. “I have to unlock the intimacy that’s already in the work,” she says of her process when working with another composer.
Where other vocalists might create a piece of singing to accompany music, then learn it and interpret it, Gerard says “that’s not the idea. That’s not the reason why Paul and I work together.” Instead, Grabowsky has “this conceptual world that he wants me to explore with my voice.”
Gerard has been doing this since she was a child. “When I was a kid, I sang in unknown languages,” she says of being raised in an Irish household in a multi-cultural neighbourhood in the inner city of Melbourne. “I grew up in a Greek Italian area, and when I heard the music coming out of these buildings I didn’t know what the language was, but I was moved by it and I didn’t think I needed to sing in English,” she recalls.
It was the same when her father played Irish music. “I didn’t really need to understand what he was singing for me to love it,” says Gerard, who believes we are all born with the ability to communicate in this pure way, as we see from babies crying, screaming or “making little googly noises”.
“Then all of a sudden, everything is formed into these systems”, which she believes leads to many suppressing true expression “because we have to go through these formulas in order to communicate, so it blocks us and it takes our confidence away.”
Gerard credits her father with not blocking this aspect of her personal, and therefore artistic, development. If she was ever singing when family friends were over and they’d ask what language was she singing – “is that Irish?” – he’d tell them “no, that’s her own language. Leave her alone.”
As a result, Gerard – who has a dramatic contralto voice and a three-octave vocal range – was on stages in pubs performing as a teenager. With musical partner Brendan Perry, she toured the world with Dead Can Dance, pioneers of neoclassical darkwave back in the eighties, and has gone on to work on at least twenty albums, either as solo releases or collaborations.
“We all have a universal language that belongs to us that is abstract. I’ve been doing this work now for 48 years and I’m living evidence that people get it,” she says. Her ethereal sounds had a cinematic quality, so a natural career progression was her move into composing film scores. Her resume boasts at least four dozen movies, composing or contributing to the scores, most notably winning a Golden Globe Award for Gladiator. Her work can also be heard on films such as Whale Rider, Black Hawk Down and her score for Balibo won her ARIA and APRA awards.
Although undeniably successful, she says she was never ambitious in this sense. “I’ve just totally lived in my dreams. Everything I’ve done, I’ve done with my soul. And when people have come, they’ve come to me. I’ve never pushed for anything where my work is concerned, ever, and that’s the truth,” she says, which is where knocking back Hans Zimmer comes into the story.
Having already worked with on The Insider (starring Russell Crowe), when Zimmer asked her to work on Gladiator she first said no. “They were shocked because they knew it was a $200 million film or whatever, but you see I work on a completely different frequency,” she says.
While composing film soundtracks involves orchestral scores, the Immortal Diamond show will be the first time she and Grabowsky have performed live together with an orchestra. “It’s actually terrifying. Do you want me to just sort of pass out with fear now? Because I can!” she says with a laugh.
Even though Immortal Diamond is a composed piece, with renowned Australian conductor Benjamin Northey leading the orchestra, Gerard says there will be one improvised piece as well. “It will just be piano and voice and then it will go back into this very spectral kind of cosmic piece that’s quite remarkable,” she says. “It’s going to be beautiful”.
Buy tickets to Lisa Gerrard, Paul Grabowsky and the MSO’s performance of Immortal Diamond at Hamer Hall on October 5 here.