The compositional journey to writing Gilgamesh as a full-length opera was a protracted one. At most points in the process the whole thing could have fallen over or spun off into another project, yet I was determined to shape this unruly narrative into an evening’s worth of music-drama using everything I had to give as a composer.

But how?

For a long time I was only familiar with the Epic of Gilgamesh itself through refraction and adaptation. At school, I read Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion, its very title referencing one of the most iconic Gilgamesh images: a humbled king roaming the desert in lion skins searching for the answers to life and death. It was the first time I’d heard of The Epic, yet I only knew enough of its basic premise to make sense of Ondaatje’s use of it as the novel’s title and epigraph.

Soon after, I heard Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů’s oratorio The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was much more my style. I have always loved the late music of Martinů and this piece is one of the largest and most ambitious in his final decade. Martinů is, however, very selective with what he includes in this hour-long work. It focuses almost exclusively on the characters of Gilgamesh and Enkidu with only the briefest mention of, or cameos for, any other sung characters. This is, however, a very valid way of adapting the Epic. It is such a discursive, sprawling narrative that zeroing in on this aspect suited well Martinů’s late-period combination of starkly hieratic post-Stravinsky Oedipus Rex choral writing with a highly refined post-Impressionist shimmer.

My interest was well and truly piqued however, by the extraordinary final song of French Spectral pioneer Gérard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil. In Grisey’s last work before his untimely death in 1998, the ultimate song ‘for crossing the threshold’ is a setting of the Flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh. It is a vision of an apocalyptic flood engulfing the entire earth before leaving ‘all of mankind returned to clay’. I found that image unbelievably powerful in Grisey’s profound and visionary setting, so it finally pushed me to become familiar with the Epic itself.

It was as far back as 2017 that Louis Garrick, my friend and colleague who began Sydney Chamber Opera with me, proposed that we write an opera together on the Epic of Gilgamesh with himself as librettist, me as composer. Thinking back now, there’s simply no way I could have even conceived of writing it at that stage in my life, but the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Nothing happened for ages, but it was about three years later that musical ideas relating to the Epic began to form in my mind and I started to take the subject seriously as a composer, imagining music that could tackle vast distances, character arcs and themes. Even then, it was slow going, but I used no fewer than six separate composition commissions from different organisations throughout 2019- 2022 to get the material for the opera worked up in various forms. Without this preparation, there’s simply no way I could have started from bar 1 and finished at bar 2460 as a single act of creation.

I view the whole span of my composing life from 2019 until 2024 as the ‘Gilgamesh’ period, where every work, no matter how big or small contributed immeasurably to the opera.

The final movement of a flute concerto I wrote for Ensemble Offspring and its flautist Lamorna Nightingale between 2019 and 2020 was the first fully-realised and performed music that made the final cut of the opera. You’ll hear this at the beginning of the last scene as a depiction of Gilgamesh and the boatman Ur-Shanabi rowing across the Waters of Death to reach the immortal human Uta-Napishti. A slow, woozy melody in the bass flute is endlessly reflected in a pool of microtonal ripples, attempting to find an end to its searching. I was very pleased with this part of the flute concerto and knew that if the opera ever saw the light of day, it would have to be a feature. The harmonic implications from just a few of these ‘ripples’ are refracted back into the Prelude of the whole opera and form question marks that punctuate its narrative.

In fact, the Prelude holds the musical ‘potential’ of the whole opera – as Enkidu is created by the Gods out of clay, so too is the world of harmony and timbral associations which will eventually form the mysteries and revelations several hours later. Composing it, I came to realise that a whole Gilgamesh-specific musical grammar had to be made which could be capable of adapting, continuing, rejecting, renewing or reinventing the practices of almost half a millennium of operatic writing as needed by this extraordinary story…