Simulacra by definition
refers to a representation or likeness – an intriguing theme for the third concert in Tura's Scale Variable series where Intercurrent ensemble explored musical doubles, echoes and shadows.
Intercurrent formed in 2016 and their vitality, unique instrumentation and
enthusiastic commissioning of composers has already set them apart in
Australian chamber music practice. The group comprises Lachlan Skipworth
co-founder and artistic director, Louise Devenish percussion, Ashley Smith
clarinets and Emily Green-Armytage piano.
Green-Armytage and
Devenish opened the program with a breathtaking performance of American
composer Hannah Lash’s C. Two repetitive melodies duelled on piano and
vibraphone with patterns of notes grouped in threes, fours or fives hammered up
against each other in parallel motion. For a few brief bars in the centre of
the work the parts aligned before the phase shifted again in a strange dance of
tugging unity. It was an astounding display of fierce independence married with
precise synchronisation.
This was followed by an
equally impressive bass clarinet solo as Smith relished the
challenge laid down by WA composer Chris Tonkin. Entr’acte explored extremes of pitch, dynamics and speed and Smith
delivered the full spectrum of bass clarinet sounds and effects with intensity and
suppleness. Rapid soft passages were interrupted with explosive outbursts,
followed by quirky micro tunings, folksy pitch sliding, slap tonguing and more.
The work was anchored by its conclusion, a section of soft, hymn-like
multiphonics where the simulacra theme was clearly apparent; each note was shadowed
by notes in the harmonic series reverberating simultaneously in a musical and
technical masterstroke.
The ensemble members came
together for the first time for the world premiere of Alex Turley’s Blue Heat. In a nod to American
minimalism Turley’s work was built around repeated semiquaver patterns gently
rising and falling in layered waves of sound. The blend of marimba, piano and
clarinet created a woody warmth from which sprung soloistic sections for piano
and clarinet plus an interlude of piano and marimba droplets sounding just like
a music box. Blue Heat was a mix of
extreme softness, transparent textures and simmering energy, released finally
in a frantic race to the end.
The use of electronics in
Julian Day’s Father offered a fresh
soundworld. Ghosts of melodies were revealed within electronic pitches that
wavered and stretched over a long slow descent. The performers emerged from
dark corners of the stage to join the melancholic hymn, adding long smooth
phrases built around the repetition of tiny two-note rhythms. The delicate
execution by the performers meant the ear became aware of minute changes to rhythm
and volume in this work of shadows and fading memories.
Finally, Philip Glass’s Music in Similar Motion, the archetypal
work of simulacra (or at least similar patterning) and the only work on the
program written before 2011, making it quite old-fashioned! The ensemble
repeated Glass’s five quaver melody in various irregular lengths with
metronomic precision, creating relentless static ripples. The addition of an
electronic track gave extra haze to the layers as the work progressed. It is an
iconic work and coming in at just less than twenty minutes is a challenge to
the stamina of the audience and the performers. Frankly alongside the more
contemporary (and far more interesting) explorations of layering and echoes it
felt a little tame. Which is a good thing, because it means the contemporary music
scene is alive, evolving and thriving, thanks to groups like Intercurrent.
This review first published by Limelight magazine in August 2017.
Alex Turley has been a compulsive composer since high school and this year he is really hitting his stride. The WA Academy of Performing Arts graduate has had music performed by the Melbourne, WA and Perth Symphony Orchestras, Soundstream Collective, Greywing ensemble and this month Blue Heat is being premiered by Intercurrent Ensemble. Later in the year Alex heads to Hobart for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra's composer's school but first he stopped by for a chat on Celebrity Soft Spot.
What music gets your heart racing?
I’ve recently become a bit obsessed with horror movie soundtracks. They’re all about using known semiotics and codes, but sometimes they’re just put together really intelligently. Michael Abels’ score for the recent movie Get Out was pretty masterful.
What calms you down?
Carrie and Lowell by Sufjan Stevens or anything by Takemitsu (his music is not necessarily ‘calm’ but it’s very reflective).
What do you sing along to?
Anything from Travelogue by Joni Mitchell or Fleetwood Mac.
Your work Blue Heat is being premiered this month by Intercurrant Ensemble, commissioned by co-co-director Lachlan Skipworth who has also been your composition teacher for the past five years. Intercurrent has a fairly unique instrumentation of percussion, piano and clarinet; how did you go about creating this piece?
Skipworth conducting Intercurrent
What I always look for in an ensemble – and is sometimes tricky to find – is some sense of homogeneity, that everything is working together as part of one machine. The instrumentation of Intercurrent is unique, yes, but at the same time feels very natural to write for. Marimba and clarinet blend well, especially in their lower ranges, and a piano can complement anything. Ashley, Louise and Emily are three of Perth’s most talented musicians, so when I was writing Blue Heat I was conscious of not letting them go to waste. So what I’ve written is really fast and difficult!
What do you hope the audience will experience when they hear it?
The piece is all about exploring energy and motion. I called it Blue Heat for a few reasons, firstly to capture a sense of fire-like energy in the sound, but also because it’s about contradictions. Can something be moving fast but at the same time not really moving at all? Can something be almost inaudible but at the same time intense and exhilarating? It’s quite a visual piece, too – the players throw different melodies to each other, and interact in lots of different ways. At some points everyone comes together and it’s difficult to distinguish which sounds are coming from whom, and at some points the ensemble breaks apart into three separate fields of individual activity. I’m hoping that the audience’s focus will be constantly moving around the ensemble, as that sort of thing makes a piece of music really exhilarating to experience.
Have you established a standard method of composing or is each piece unique?
I certainly have a ‘groove’ that I get into when I’m composing, but I’m still very conscious of not making all of my pieces sound the same. One of the tricky things about learning how to be a composer is finding a balance between having a voice and language that you can claim as uniquely yours, but not churning out the same piece over and over, and I’ve watched many composers fall too far on either side of that spectrum. For me I try and focus each work on a different visual or extra-musical idea (an image, poem or place, for example) that can take the audience into a unique world, but across every work I still have a very ‘Turley’ way of doing things.
Pencil and manuscript or computer?
Honestly, both are equally frustrating. I wish I could just Bluetooth my brain into a computer and write scores telepathically.
With Greywing Ensemble. Photo Bohdan Warchomij.
You’ve been composing since high school. You made a brave choice in pursuing it for a career; Australia is not renowned for appreciating its own composers! Why did you choose composition?
I caught the bug, unfortunately. In my teenage years I was immersed in a very musical environment, and I became obsessed with deconstructing the language of music, learning as much as I could about how and why everything works the way it does. It’s so mystifying to me how something as mundane as a vibration in the air can produce such intense physical and emotional responses in us. I spent as much time as I could exploring this process, eventually making my own music just as a means of understanding. When I finished school it was a little tempting for me to go and do Law or something nice like that but by that point I had such a deep fascination with music that anything else would have made me quite unhappy. Yes, Australian composers have a very difficult time getting people interested in their music, but I am really determined to make everything work and I’m not going to give up without a fight. There are lots of things that can go alongside composing really nicely – arranging, engraving, conducting, teaching, researching, producing, administrating – so it’s not as if I’m lost for things to do.
You are having a remarkably successful year including wining the Penrith Symphony Orchestras Young Composer Award and being selected for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Composer School, plus upcoming performances of your works in Texas, Mexico City, Brisbane, Sydney and Perth. Where to from here?
I’m still at that point in my life where everything is really new, and I’m just trying to pull things together into some semblance of a freelance career. 2017 for me has been the year that everything has really begun to pick up speed. I’ve got myself to a place where I’m really confident with my craft and my ability to produce good music for people. It’s still a huge rush for me when someone that I barely know from across the country (or in Texas!) is actually interested in what I’m doing and wants to work with me. From here I’m just trying to make as much good music as I can, and I’m trying to diversify as well into areas such as art installation and theatre. There’s lots of stuff in the pipeline!
Listen here to City of Ghosts performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2016.
Mark Applebaum says music should above all else be interesting. What do you think is the most important role of music?
It’s hard to argue with that statement. For me I think music just needs to produce a response – emotional, physical, memory, whatever – and the more intense the response the more powerful the music.
You have a soft spot for saxophone. You’ve composed a Sax Quartet, a Sax Concerto, a work for Sax and piano and another for Sax and cello. What is the appeal of this instrument?
I never set out to write so much for saxophone! It all happened because one of my close friends from uni (David Gioia) is a saxophonist, and he is incredible. I’m completely in awe of how he’s able to paint melody with an astonishing amount of precision and nuance. Together we found that his style of playing was really well suited to my style of writing, so we collaborated on all of those pieces that you just mentioned. We even recorded an album together which will be released in the near future. That kind of ongoing collaboration ended up being very significant in my development as a composer.
'Ink' with Alex Turley piano and David Gioia saxophone
Who are your music heroes?
My heroes are the people around me – young composers and young artists in general – that are taking risks, producing great work, making things happen and being lovely people in the process. Lachlan Skipworth, Dan Thorpe, Josten Myburgh, Lisa Cheney, Peggy Polias, Connor D’Netto, Bec Smith, Kezia Yap, Samuel Smith, Sally Greenaway, Tim Newhouse, Cassie To, Sam Wolf, to name just a few!
What is your favourite place in Perth?
The beach near my old house, lovely place to take my dogs at sunset!
Do you have a soft spot for anything else in life or is it all about the music?
I love taking photos, I’m also a huge fan of visual art and theatre, I’ve recently become quite obsessed with architecture, I travel as much as I can afford to, I try and keep up to date with feminism, I’m obsessed with interior design… the list goes on! I also work in a fancy-ish restaurant and I actually really enjoy it (weird, I know).
Thank you Alex Turley for participating in the Celebrity Soft Spot series. You can read an interview with Alex here at CutCommon mag and listen to a Making Waves podcast here. For more details about Alex and his work go to alexturley.com. Future performances:
29th August: World premiere of Blue Heat by Intercurrent, State Theatre Centre. Program also includes works by Julian Day, Chris Tonkin, Hannah Lash and Philip Glass.2 Sep: Between the Ocean and the Sky performed by Jonathan Thompson, a PhD oboist from Texas who has commissioned composers from all over the world via the internet. 10 Sep: New Commission (piano duet) performed by Liam Viney and Anna Grinberg, Queensland Art Gallery. This is a part of a concert series called ARGO that seeks to take classical music out of the concert hall and into interactive spaces. They are playing the piece from either sides of an indoor lake.28 Oct: New Commission (orchestra) performed by the Penrith Symphony Orchestra in Sydney as part of the Young Composer Award.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a percussionist?
I've always secretly wanted to play percussion. Rhythm is one of the most primal and powerful forms of communication. Percussionists get to dance around (often barefoot) on stage and always seem to be having so much fun!
Now is our chance! Speak Percussion are putting a call out for 100 percussionists - NO EXPERIENCE REQUIRED - to participate in their performance at the Totally Huge New Music Festival in October.
Speak Percussion and guests will unite in the 13th THNMF to perform the WA premiere of A wave and waves by American composer Michael Pisaro, a massive 74-minute work for 100 performers on 100 instruments.
They are offering a rare opportunity to join with one of Australia’s most dynamic and risk taking arts organisations in an extraordinary new music project. A wave and waves is a project that redefines the way contemporary chamber music is presented.
The Midland Railway Workshops will be transformed into a sonic and visual ocean of instruments and performers, creating an intimate experience of monumental proportions.
No percussion experience is required – this call is open to all interested people. Participants will work with Eugene Ughetti (Artistic Director, Speak Percussion), Louise Devenish (Head of Percussion, University of Western Australia) and Tura’s production team.
There are 3 rehearsals before performances on 29th October.
Sign up here before September 1st. More details here. Go on, be brave, be a percussionist!
I was delighted to be able to review the Women in the Creative Arts conference recital for The Australian newspaper. The concert featured the Muses Trio, an ensemble remarkable both for their charisma and for their focus on performing music by women. Their dedication to performing the eight works on the program included a month of workshops with the composer (sometimes via skype). Four of the composers were present for the performance and gave insightful introductions to their works. The concert was richly thought provoking and often very beautiful, a fitting centrepiece for a conference celebrating women in the arts.
Christa Powell, Therese Milanovic and Louise King. Photo William Hall
"I’ll let you in on Australia’s best kept secret: our nation has one of the highest proportions of women composers in the world. Last week more than a hundred people gathered at the Australian National University to celebrate the diverse work of women who make up 26% percent of Australian composers, sound artists and improvising artists.
The centrepiece of the Women in the Creative Arts conference was a Friday night concert by Queensland’s The Muses Trio who performed eight works for piano trio chosen from around 100 international score submissions. Pianist Therese Milanovic, violinist Christa Powell and cellist Louise King’s authoritative interpretations were inflected with humanity and detail, marred only by a rather boomy piano (half-stick the lid!) and occasional mis-pitches in the violin.
Queensland-based Nicole Murphy’s Spinning Top opened the concert. Breathless repeated figures, harmonic stasis and some off-kilter syncopation gave this piece a self-contained perpetual motion. Minimalist patterns also underpinned US composer Jean Ahn’s A Flash of Ravel where Ravelian snippets were fragmented and juxtaposed with sections of string pizzicato and harmonics."
Despite the chilly Canberra weather the atmosphere this past week at the Women in the Creative Arts conference has been incredibly warm. The academic papers, panels, performances and the rigorous discussions were all under-girded with encouragement and cheers of support.
WICA composers, performers, academics. Photo William Hall
I was able to witness the impact Women of Note has had in the landscape, something I hadn't realised from Perth. I was told countless stories about how my book had influenced people in their commissioning, their perfoming, and their careers.
Photo William Hall
I was overwhelmed by how much people felt supported and affirmed by my work. And it was so exciting to see the next generation of composers learning from the work of their forebears:
"....I confess to my shame I hadn't heard of Margaret Sutherland before now..."..
".... a couple of years ago I read your book and decided I wanted to meet Helen Gifford, to see her, to commission her..."
"...the bridge building you are doing for the music industry is so important..."
Liza Lim, Natalie Williams, Mathew Dewey (ABC), Naomi Johnson (ABC), Lisa Cheney
There are are significant changes afoot around the visibility and celebration of our women composers and I am so excited to be part of it. 47 papers, 4 recitals, 5 keynotes and 3 panels later I think some of the changes are going to stick this time around. In the immediate future:
* Cat Hope has offered to host the conference next year at Monash.
* Vanessa Tomlinson will be rollling out her research from Queensland University to include every tertiary institution documenting the works that are being performed in graduation recitals.
* Joanna Drimatis is collating a database of graded works for performance by schools and community groups.
Add that to the ongoing work from the Hildegard Commissioning Project, the findings from the APRA/AMCOS commissioned report on results from RMIT research, the Skipping a Beat report, the Australian Women Screen Composers report, and there is a sense of growing awareness and action toward increasing visibility for women composers.
I'll post my keynote paper soon to add to the discussion.
With the magnificent composer Judith Clingan
I have the satisfied feeling that my book has done what it was meant to do.I sold out of copies of Women of Note at the conference. Which means my print run with Fremantle Press is finished and it is time for an eBook.
So now it is time to head back home to my family, filled with a warm glow, and work out where to from here.
Huge thanks to Natalie Williams and ANU for hosting this incredible event.
My Opinion piece for The Guardian was published today.
I
am really pleased to be able to document nationally the exciting energy in the
industry at the moment around women composers. The article is already
generating a storm of comments. Got to love a controversial topic!
Australia's
female composers are having a moment. We need to harness that energy.
“Everything
I’ve ever wanted to do would’ve been easier had I been a boy. But never mind, I
never paid much attention to it, I just marched in and there I was.”
These
fighting words come from Peggy
Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990), arguably the most famous female composer
in her time and one of the first Australian women to march into the
male-dominated world of composition.
Back
then, the costs were high: Glanville-Hicks’s colleague Margaret Sutherland was
married to a psychiatrist who thought a woman wanting to compose music was a
sign of mental illness, while many women had to lie about their gender in order
to be published. The positions on the boards and in the institutions were held
by men who also received the majority of the commissions.
Today
women make up 26% of Australian composers, sound artists and improvising
performers. It’s not close to gender parity but the figures do stack up well
internationally – the only country to fare better is Estonia with 30%. Women
make up about 20% of American and Polish composers but, for most countries, the
average is a woeful 15%.
Women
have also made a significant contribution to Australia’s music history, often
punching above their male contemporaries. Sutherland almost single-handedly
pioneered modernism in Australia music and, in 1938, Glanville-Hicks was the
first person to represent Australia at the International Society of
Contemporary Music. Anne Boyd smashed through the glass ceiling to become the
first woman and first Australian to be appointed professor of music at the
University of Sydney in 1991. Today Liza Lim, Mary Finsterer and Elena
Kats-Chernin are likely to rank higher internationally than their male
contemporaries.
Sadly,
however, the majority of women still struggle with visibility. According to
musicologist Sally Macarthur, women’s music represented only 11% of the works
performed at new music concerts in 2013. In the concert halls where the more
conservative orchestras reside, it is far rarer to hear a work by a female
composer – dead or alive.
But
a new surge of energy is bringing female composers into the spotlight. In
August, hundreds of women, including myself, will gather at the Women in the
Creative Arts conference in Canberra as part of a wave of industry activism –
hopefully, they say, for the last time.
Robert Braham has been conducting Perth choirs for decades with the kind of magic that can extract joyful, enthusiastic singing even from teenage school boys. His new ensemble Voyces is attracting attention for its clean, fresh sound. They have performed at the opening of the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival, collaborated with artists the calibre of Emma Matthews and Sara Macliver and built a reputation for commissioningAustralian composers. Voyces' debut album will be launched this week at a concert called Hush.
Robert Braham. Photos Nic Babic Photography
What music gets your heart racing? Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto springs to mind but virtuosic jazz playing is just as good. Wycliffe Gordon on trombone is a current favourite but I always come back to Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Centre Orchestra where everyone is a virtuoso player. What calms you down? There are some wonderful current composers of choral music and vocal solos. Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (No. 3, Op. 36) for soprano and orchestra is just the ticket but on the a cappella choral side the works of Ola Gjeilo, Paul Mealor and others are both rich and calming at the same time. These and other modern choral composers know how to write so expressively for choir. Voyces will do some Ola Gjeila in their September concert. What do you sing along to? Symphonies mainly. I think this comes from my time as a horn player, especially the Romantic repertoire. Of course I cannot help but sing along with the symphonic choir repertoire; Handel’s Messiah, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the works of Vaughan Williams. The list would be long. It is what I conducted for 14 years with the Perth Oratorio Choir.
What was your original vision behind the creation of Voyces choir?
The original vision behind Voyces was a youth aged choir who would sing a lot of contemporary classical music and especially Australian composers. After the WA Youth Music Association choir finished up a group of ex Trinity College boys who were members of the WAYMA Chorale wanted to start a new choir. It was based in St Joseph’s Church in Subiaco for a while and so was called the St Joseph’s Chamber Choir. Now we are based at Trinity College but still have our annual Christmas concert at St Joseph’s. The age of the choir has also expanded.
The choir membership has always been based on selecting highly trained musicians who get what it is to sing quality choral contemporary music. They don’t all have to be highly trained singers but they do need to have good musical skills and be quick learners. We love presenting quality modern choral works that our audience will enjoy. Sometimes that involves breaking down the traditional choir model of stand and sing. At our Spin concert, last year, we had several pieces where the choir moved around the stage while singing with images projected onto a screen and one piece where we started in the auditorium with a dramatized political narrative and ended on stage with some very intense singing. You can pretty well guarantee that the audience will hear works they have never heard before at a Voyces concert. Always interesting but also accessible. With our June 10 concert the program will be all Australian works including works for choir, percussion and strings. Every piece is novel and musically wonderful.
Voyces sing Night by Matthew Orlovich, 2016.
How are you preparing for the Hush concert on June 10th at the Government House Ballroom? The preparation for the concert is tied in with the preparation for the recordings. The choir is doing such detailed work for the recording that it is ideal for concert preparation. The difference is we mainly sing concerts from memory but record with the scores so we have yet to test how the memorization is going. I am sure with all the recording time the memory work will almost take care of itself. Fingers crossed. Voyces will also release an album as part of this concert – why did you decide to make an album? Our public has been asking about a CD recording for quite a while now. It is time I think to put some of the repertoire down that we think defines who we are as a choir. We were also very keen to record ‘Hooves of Fate’, a work we commissioned from Australian composer Dan Walker as well as other pieces that we either premiered, or, were versions of compositions that have not been recorded. Voyces has commissioned and performed a significant amount of new choral music in the five years since its inception. Why is it important to be singing music by contemporary Australian composers? There are wonderful young and established Australian composers writing choral music. There are also a multitude of good choirs in Australia these days. They should be championing Australian music. I love building the relationship between a choir and a composer. It is a very personal thing having music written for your choir. It also comes with great challenges and ultimately (even with an open conversation between the composer and yourself) the end result can still be full of wonderful musical surprises. I have never been disappointed with a commissioned work. You have to trust but also be prepared to take a risk. At Trinity College we commissioned Paul Jarman to write a work for the Senior Chorale for our USA tour. Paul warned me that it was not what our original intentions had been but thought I and more importantly the boys would love it. He even left a section open to workshop with the boys over a weekend. By the end of the weekend the boys owned and knew the piece. It was a great hit. If anyone has a youth male choir try it. It is called ‘Let Go of My Hand’. Mark Applebaum says music should above all else be interesting. What do you think is the most important role of music? That is the million-dollar question. Music is tied up with life, with the evolution of humans since before language. It is a part of every culture. It represents the extremes of emotion, it lifts us and it calms us. It is a great discipline to be involved with for there are so many skills in the art of music making. It lights up more of the brain than most other human activities so it has to be mentally healthy as well. It is something we all should have in our lives at some level. I think it was the great conductor Zubin Mehta commenting on an orchestral concert in the middle east who said something like: while the audience is absorbed in the music they at least have peace in their lives. It is a nice thought.
Voyces with Sara Macliver at St Joseph's Church Subiaco
You have a soft spot for choral music – why the voice? Choirs were not my first choice of music making. I sang at school but mainly played orchestral music through university. Eight years in the orchestral pit with the Western Australian Arts Orchestra playing for opera in particular was a great education watching conductors and singers interact. My first real conducting work was in music theatre. From there I took on the Perth Oratorio Choir and discovered a whole world of large-scale choral music. So getting into choral work happened slowly at first and was paralleled by conducting opportunities. Your day job is director of music at Trinity College. The only time most Aussies practice communal singing (!) is at the footy – how do you go about teaching school boys to sing? There is a great culture of singing at Trinity established over many years. Boys need to be given the chance to sing with other boys and the more the merrier. If you can get them through the vocal transition successfully they progress from loving their treble voices to loving their mature voices. They love bold sounds, they love rich harmonies and they love rhythmic interest. And if they love it they bring their mates. If you can build a culture where the whole senior school sings then developing expressive choral singing in teenage boys is just a refinement. It is always hard work but once they are hooked with quality repertoire there is no turning back. We also make sure the younger boys get the opportunity to hear the older boys. Aspiration means a lot in a boys’ school and a bit of competition never hurts.
Voyces perform Tanguendo by Oscar Escalada with
dancers Geoff Hendrikse and Jelena Martinovic, 2016.
The choir will be heading to Choralfest later this month. What will your role be there? Voyces is a guest choir at Choralfest. It is our second venture to the Australian National Choral Association festival. We will sing two separate programs of Australian music from our CD along with other fine Australian choirs. It is a great chance to network for the choristers and conductors and there will be wonderful international people there to work with and learn from. It is not often that choirs of this level actually get together and sing to a choral community so it is a real buzz. Always a bit of pressure but that will sharpen the performance. Where did you learn the skills to direct a choir? On the job would have to be the best answer to this question. Attending master classes and symposiums, observing and discussing conducting with other conductors and then implementing changes to what you do over many years. It is an ongoing process. Recently I attended the Vancouver Chamber Choir conductors’ symposium working with Jon Washburn. It was an intense week working with a professional choir but it was highly motivating. Can you describe the unique sound of Voyces? It is the sound of young, switched on musicians who love what they do. It is fresh, clean and always exciting.
Robert Braham
What is your favourite place in Perth? I love our back garden. It is such a calming place to sit and enjoy. I have always loved the view of the city from Kings Park. It must be one of the best city views in Australia. I also love the combination of the old and new in some of Perth’s architecture – like St Mary’s Cathedral and of course the Mt Lawley strip for Saturday morning shopping. Do you have a soft spot for anything else in life or is it all about the music? I love art especially pastels and used to do quite a bit of drawing. Maybe it is something I will get back to when life is not so hectic. The gym has become quite addictive in recent years. I am also a sucker for good Nordic Noir and BBC dramas. Of course there is always the cricket. Thank you to Robert Braham for participating in the Celebrity Soft Spot series. Voyces will launch their debut CD at the Hush concert on June 10th. For more information about upcoming concerts go to the Voyces website or check them out on Facebook.
June is a rich month of music for all the ages; dive in and enjoy!
It is particularly action-packed for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra who will present four mainstage orchestral concerts plus the explosive energy of Education Week with its multiple concerts for children and their families.
This year for Education Week (19-25th) WASO has invited award winning British composer and music educationist Paul
Rissmann us for a week-long musical adventure exploring gorgeous
children's books across a variety of interactive programs. The concerts include school shows Sir Scallywag and the Golden Underpants, The Beat of Your Feet and The Lion Who Loved plus a Conductor Masterclass with Ben Northey. The Rusty Orchestra is also back with a concert on the 24th June featuring community musicians playing alongside WASO players in a concert with the biggest amount of heart you're likely to hear.
If you have children come with us on Sunday
25th - we will be checking out the family concert The Beat of Your Feet, about a music-loving dog and cat and their musical
adventure to find the Greatest Orchestra in the World. The concert is a mix of music, illustrated projections and audience participation, based
on the book Stan and Mabel by Jason Chapman with vocals by Libby Hammer.
Meanwhile the rest of the music community has some lovely offerings this month, including two particularly stunning vocal concerts: the Giovanni Consort singing French Chansons on the 4th, and Voyces on the 10th celebrating their fifth anniversary with a concert of all-Australian music and the launch of their debut album Hush.
On the 11th there is a a triple whammy with the Darlington Trio offering Brahms, Musica Viva launching their national tour of the Pacifica Trio (including a world premiere by Nigel Westlake) and the experimental trio The Necks presented by Tura New Music.
Perth Chamber Orchestra (the little sister of Perth Symphony) is performing an intriguing concert in Midland on the 14th called Steampunk Mozart, which promises industrial-inspired music, food, wine, a sound installation and the magic of Mozart conducted by Jessica Gethin. Then in larger form the Perth Symphony Orchestra will also perform on the 27th with the WA Academy of Performing Arts Gospel Choir in a concert dedicated to the music of George Michael.
Also on at WAAPA this month is the second and third year students performance of 42nd Street opening on the 17th.
First we had the American all-stars Eighth Blackbird, now we have the Russians and the Brits! It is an exciting time over the next few weeks as Perth welcomes some of the legends of the international new music scene.
British experimental musician and filmmaker Mike Cooper arrives in Perth this week for a 10 day residency with Tura New Music.
Mike Cooper. Photo Leila Buongiorno
A week of workshops, masterclasses and solo performances will culminate in the presentation of Cooper's genre defining live original soundtrack to the 1928 black and white classic, White Shadows In The South Seas. Audiences will be able to hear Cooper create vast sonic landscapes using his trademark Hawaiian Lap Steel guitar and electronics. He calls his music ambient electronic exotica style which is appropriate for a Brit living in Rome who collects Hawaiian shirts!
Cooper began his career as a folk-blues guitarist and singer songwriter and his output has expanded to include improvised and electronic music, live music for silent films, radio art and sound installations. He is also a music journalist, a visual artist, film and video maker and appears on more than 60 records.
Residency details:
22 and 23 April - Group Improvisation workshops at Subiaco Arts Centre
23 April 5pm - Workshop Showing, Subiaco Arts Centre
24 April 8pm - Solo set at iMprov Bar 459, Rosemount Hotel
26 April 8pm- White Shadows In The South Sea – Film and live performance PS Art Space, Fremantle.
The Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble will be arriving shortly after Cooper for a concert on May 2nd as part of the ensemble's first Australian tour. The group will perform as part of Tura's Scale Variable New Chamber Music series, providing a rare opportunity to hear Russian new music performed by their fellow countrymen. The program includes works by Russian composers Edison Denisov, Alexei Sioumak, Dmitri Kourliandski and Sergei Newski. plus the premiere of a new work by Australian composer Michael Smetanin.New Music
The group formed in 1990 and have since premiered over 800 works. The Perth line up will feature Ivan Bushuev (flute), Oleg Tantsov (clarinet), Mikhail Dubov (piano) and Vladisal Pesin (violin).
I managed to snap a selfie with composer Kate Neal last night at the world premiere of her work Never Tilt a Chair. The work sat most satisfyingly alongside Mauricio Kagel's iconic Dressur which was receiving it's long-overdue Australian premiere.
with composer Kate Neal
Hooray for Tura New Music and PICA for bringing it about. I am impressed again by Louise Devenish - yet another awesome contribution to the Perth new music scene, with the support of her fellow leading theatre-music percussionists Leah Scholes and Vanessa Tomlinson. I love concerts like these: so much to see, so much to hear.
The set for Never Tilt Your Chair
Leah Schole, Vanessa Tomlinson and Louise Devenish
The WA Academy of Performing Arts is in full swing this month. Concerts include Clocked Out Duo percussion stars Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold performing on the 4th and renowned English conductor Nicholas Cleobury leading vocal students in a performance featuring Tippett's Negro Spirituals on the 6th.
The school of music at UWA is also hitting full steam with a Mainstage Concert on the 9th featuring Shaun Lee-Chen and the student orchestra performing a world premiere by jazz composer Joe Chindamo. On the 28th the Schoenberg Project will feature student arrangements of Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces plus an arrangement by Brett Dean from when he was a student - it could be very revealing!
Thank you Louise Devenish for this update: On April 10-11th an unusual gig at PICA called Never Tilt Your Chair Back on Two Legs brings together three of Australia's leading female percussionists for Maurice Kagel's music theatre piece Dressur. Set at a formal dinner table, the theme of dinner time etiquette will also be explored in a new work by Kate Neal.
The Australian String Quartet take over Margaret River from the 21-23rd for a Chamber Music weekend - what's not to love?!
The WA Symphony Orchestra go retro with The Best of British on the 7th before a Sibelius fest on 20/21/22 with Asher Fisch conducting the second symphony and concert master Laurence Jackson in Stravinsky's Violin Concerto. On the 28/29th the Zuckerman Trio join the orchestra for Beethoven's Triple Concerto with Pinchas Zukerman also featuring in Berg's Violin Concerto.
Let me know if I've missed anything. See you at a concert soon!
I’m always interested to follow the progress of composers from Women of Note. Elena Kats-Chernin’s output continues at an incredible speed. Her many fans will be pleased to know her latest album is another collaboration with pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska, this time with Eric Satie as the muse. Unsent love letters contains 26 miniatures by Kats-Chernin inspired by Satie’s extraordinary life and music.
“Satie’s life was a fascinating, fervoursome affair,” says pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska, who recorded the album, “from the first strike of love and then lifelong estrangement with artist and muse Suzanne Valadon, to the unexpected celebrity and conflict of his last ten years. After he died friends, gaining access to his apartment for the first time in almost three decades, found conditions both perplexing and romantically fastidious in their own way: two grand pianos one atop the other, one chair, one table, seven velvet suits and the love letters – many, many unsent love letters.”
The album reflects on idiosyncrasies and anecdotes from Satie’s life, with music that ranges from seductive orientalism to hypnotic melodies reminiscent of the ground-breaking, transcendent beauty of Satie’s own piano pieces. Kats-Chernin's miniature ‘imaginary building’ reflects on Satie's sketches of imaginary buildings (which he even advertised in the newspaper for rent and purchase); ‘very shiny’is a reflection on one of his characteristically opaque performance directions and ‘postcard to a critic’ is named after Satie’s explosive response to a negative review (leading to a spell in gaol).
Kats-Chernin and Cislowska
The buoyant rhythms and rhapsodic harmonic style that have brought Kats-Chernin a reputation as one of the best-loved composers of her generation provide the perfect lens to reflect on a musical great of the previous century. Together Kats-Chernin and Cislowska The album is released today by Universal Music and available from ABC Shops and iTunes.
International Women's Day is just around the corner and I'm proud to be participating with a Musical Soiree at Joondalup Library.
If you are in the area on Wednesday 8th March pop in to Joondalup Library at 6pm for a glass of wine and a chance to hear some stunning music and stories from my book Women of Note.
It's essentially an author talk but more fun with musical samples and (sometimes scandalous) stories which invariably provoke plenty of discussion. My presentation gives a quick history of Australian composition by tracing three generations of women composers. The musical range is enormous. I find people are surprised by how much they enjoy my talks - I guess most people assume classical music is going to be a bit dull, but the lives and music from Women of Note are anything but dull!
I can't think of a better way to celebrate women in Australia than to profile the work of our women composers. It's our best kept secret: we have more women composers than almost any other western nation! Definitely something worth celebrating and I do love putting together the missing jigsaw pieces of our musical history.
Feel free to circulate among your networks. The details regarding registration and location are here.
“A welcome – and overdue – publication. Appleby displays an expertise probably honed by her years as a journalist. She writes engagingly, achieving a fine balance between conveying information about the women’s personal lives and their music.”
Jillian Graham
Australian Book Review March 2012.
“Women of Note makes an excellent starting point for anyone interested in exploring the music of Australian women composers. The musical lives and survival stories of all the womenare inspiring. One can almost believe anything is possible. At the very least women of all ages can find in it a variety of survival tips...”
Jenny Game-Lopata, Musicological Society of Australia Journal July 2013
Last night's concert ticked so many musical boxes I'm not sure where to start!
Eighth Blackbird
The premiere of a work by a young woman composer was always going to grab the attention of the author of a book on Australian women composers. Holly Harrison's Lobster Tails and Turtle Soup was premiered by Eighth Blackbird, America's rockstars of classical music. Clarinetist Michael Maccaferri from the sextet described the work as extremely difficult, (even for them!) but it exploded off the page with a quirky energy that had the audience in raptures. Harrison drew inspiration from the nonsensical writing of Lewis Carol and her music captured the whimsy and madness incredibly well in a mash of extended techniques, experimental rock and blues.
with Holly Harrison shortly before her world premiere
Harrison's work sat alongside works written in the past four years by American composers Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, Timo Andres and Ted Hearnes. These are composers born in the 70's and 80's and young enough to be freer than previous generations of the style-police of modernist ideology - free in other words to be the composers they want to be. Yes there were plenty of modernist extended techniques and nods to minimalist composers but there were also hip hop vibes and musical conversations about contemporary art and politics.
Eighth Blackbird played with professionalism and high octane energy. As an ensemble they were tightly coordinated but also able to relax into a groove.
There was a sense of an international family, drawn together under the umbrella of the organisation Musica Viva, (with support from the Perth Festival). American performers rocking out to music by an Australian composer, with program notes by UK critic Jessica Duchen and an audience of very enthusiastic new music appreciators.
Setting up for Pre-concert talk
I admit to being pleasantly surprised at the full chairs for my pre-concert talk and the large concert hall crowd. There was an atmosphere of enthusiasm and curiosity. The questions in the post show Meet the Artist interview came from mostly elderly audience members (exploding my sterotypes!) who were keen to clarify and learn more. Musica Viva has educated and grown an audience who do not fear the unknown.
This concert was a gift: music written today, for us, for our time. Thank you Musica Viva for being one of the few Australian organisations brave enough to champion this repertoire.
