“Some music takes us back to moments we thought we had left behind. Dale Cornelius gives those memories a voice, finding beauty and hope in the things we carry with us.”
Dale Cornelius poses a very personal question in What Is Carried, What Is Left Behind?: what do we carry with us as life changes and what do we eventually learn to let go of? The six track album was released in October 2026 and is a fusion of modern classical, string quartet, synthesiser and found sound. It’s a project which for Cornelius (award winning Australian composer, known for his work in film and television) provides a space to tell stories which don’t necessarily need a screen or a narrative to have meaning. The music is the story, the music is the telling. The album opens with ‘In this moment what matters most?’ which is a piece born from a phrase that really came to the fore when Cornelius was looking after his mum and dealing with his own anxiety. It’s a reminder to focus on what is actually important when life is so very uncertain. That’s the essence of the track in that it’s a reflective piece, a piece that asks you to slow down and think about who and what you actually want to be around. It’s the core theme of the record really, that life doesn’t give you control over everything but you can still choose what you want to hold on to. It’s a record that finds its value in the questions rather than in the answers.
The title track “What Is Carried, What Is Left Behind?” arose in part from a rather serendipitous encounter with a sound in Montalcino, Italy. Walking around the vicinity of the Concattedrale di San Salvatore one night, Cornelius picked up the sound of a metal door moving in the wind. It was a perfectly ordinary sound in a perfectly ordinary situation, yet the quality of it was quite striking and it stuck in his head as the basis for the piece. There’s a certain appropriateness to that. You have a sound that would have been completely unremarkable at the time, which then becomes the seed of a much larger idea. It’s very much like a memory which takes on a different significance many years after the event itself. The recording of that door is not just background noise in the piece, it’s embedded within a carefully constructed soundscape which is designed to make you listen to the detail. The emotional heart of the album is undoubtedly “A Whispered Dawn (Spencer’s Lullaby)”. Cornelius wrote that piece in 1999, at a very traumatic time in his life following the premature birth of his son Spencer. Spencer was born at 27 weeks and spent three months in the NICU with his chances of survival far from certain. The piece was written at that time as a response to the fear and the uncertainty of Spencer’s life. It remained a piece of manuscript for 26 years and has only now been recorded. Its inclusion on this album is therefore very significant. He’s not just going back to a piece of music he wrote years ago; he’s going back to that time in his life with the benefit of hindsight and the experience of time. The decision to record the lullaby now gives the album a very real link between the past and the present. The original piece is of course the emotional record of a father facing an uncertain future. The new recording is the record of everything that came after. It doesn’t in any way diminish the fear of that original experience but it does allow the music to exist in the context of the hope that came afterwards. Cornelius calls it “the answer that piece has been waiting on for 26 years”. That’s a very potent way of understanding the album as a whole really. It’s not necessarily about being trapped in the past. It can be about finally having the space to look at it in a different way.
The surrounding compositions then extend that emotional world. “Innocence” is another lens through which to view it and “Under an Impersonal Sky There Is Hope” is a very different kind of hope. “Bloom” is the track which brings the six piece collection to a point of natural renewal. Taken as a whole they are a considered journey through uncertainty, memory and the potential for moving on. The Eclective Strings string writing provides the album with its human warmth and the use of synths and found sounds takes it well beyond the confines of a traditional chamber setting. Available in stereo and Dolby Atmos spatial audio, the album is also an experience in which you can hear the different layers and positions of sound around you. Cornelius has over 20 years’ experience to his name with a track record of over 90 productions to his credit (Mary & Max, Backtrack, Till Human Voices Wake Us, The Doctor Blake Mysteries to name but a few). What Is Carried, What Is Left Behind? is very different in character to the work we’ve seen before which has been created to serve a film or TV story. This time the personal experience is the story. He’s worked with Melbourne-based Eclective Strings and it’s the use of the instruments and the placement of the sounds that really allow the emotion to come through. What Is Carried, What Is Left Behind? is a very moving piece of work which is essentially a meditation on the way our lives go on to shape us. The most affecting moments are those relating to the relationship between sound and memory, particularly in the long anticipated recording of ‘A Whispered Dawn (Spencer’s Lullaby)’. Across six well considered pieces Dale Cornelius reminds us that the past doesn’t just go away. Sometimes we carry it with us, sometimes we go back and find something new. And sometimes after all that time, a piece of music is finally ready to be heard.
English