BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
This week, six composers from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music will have a selection of their works performed to a public audience for the first time.
Laura Abraham, Fernice Goh, John Li, Robert McIntyre, Aidan McGartland, and Claire Higgins will see Melba Hall immersed in their own music. We chat with one of these composers, Claire, about why the 15 May event Autumnal Beginnings is meaningful to her.
Claire is enrolled in composition at MCM after a year of piano performance. Having studied at the Australian National University in the ’90s, she returns to composition as a mature aged student after a career in administration and project support.
Claire, thanks for taking part in this interview. There are six composers involved in this concert – how’d you all come to work together?
We’re all students in the first semester of the composition specialisation in the Bachelor of Music course at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. I’m studying alongside Laura Abraham, Fernice Goh, John Li, Aidan McGartland and Robert McIntyre.
You’ve described this as a ‘debut concert’ for you as composers and students. How are you preparing yourself for the task of showing your works to your family, friends, and fellow professionals?
You realise pretty quickly that you need to start your preparation well ahead of time. Most of the works being performed have been written this semester, so the first step was to finish the work! Then we each had to go out and find musicians to play our pieces, and work with them on refining the music and addressing any technical difficulties specific to the instrument.
There are also the arrangements for the concert itself – publicity, logistics and programming. After all that, it feels like the mental preparation happens at the last minute!
I’m excited about the night, but this is the first time my music will have been aired publicly, so I feel a little trepidation about people hearing something that is so close to my heart.
What’s been the dynamic between you as composers? What are you learning from each other behind the scenes?
It’s early days for us as a group, but we’re slowly finding a rhythm and getting more comfortable with sharing our own thoughts and ideas about composition, as well as our vulnerabilities.
I think we’re yet to discover if any of us have a similar compositional voice, but certainly some of the projects we were set this semester have brought out similar qualities in our music. For example, we were asked to explore moment form in a piece for a solo woodwind instrument. My own understanding of moment form is that it involves creating standalone musical ideas or motifs that exist in their own right and are deliberately unassociated from other moments in the music.
I loved this project, because it really forced me to step away from my comfort zone and normal compositional habits that I’ve noticed I keep coming back to. I think to some degree, it was a similar process for my peers.
Your performance also forms part of your assessment for your composition studies this semester. How does approaching the presentation of your music through the path of study differ to approaching it through the path of general public performance?
I think we’re extremely fortunate to have this platform for the presentation of our works as students. The conservatorium has provided this opportunity and much of the background support that we would otherwise have to arrange ourselves. I certainly feel nurtured and a great deal of encouragement to dive in and enjoy the process! Any pressure I feel is probably just in my head, because I feel we ought to treat it as though it were a concert we’re putting on in our own professional capacity.
Presenting our music in a university setting means we have wonderful access to musicians studying at the conservatorium, who are open to new opportunities and generously giving of their time in learning new works by student composers. If we were outside the university, we would need to source a venue and consider other matters of insurance, payment, payment for publicity, and so on. I’m sure there is a lot for us to learn about the public performance of our music and how to go about this.
You’d previously studied composition at the Australian National University. Tell us a little about these experiences, and what you hope to gain from studying composition this time around.
When I first studied composition, I didn’t finish the course and while I walked away from it, I think I’ve almost always known that I wanted to go back to it. Call it unfinished business!
I applied for the course when the time was right for me, and although it was daunting, I finally felt that I was ready to return. For me, I think writing music is so tied up in my identity that it’s a need as well as a want. While there have been many moments of self doubt, the course has given me the strength and affirmation to continue.
It’s about 20 years since I studied at the ANU. In many ways, I think I was too young to be delving into the world of composing at that time. I’m sure it’s different for everyone, but I think I had much to learn, especially going from a small country town to what then felt like a big city. I don’t think I was ready for the challenge back then, although I learnt a great deal studying with Jim Cotter, Larry Sitsky, and the team from the then-Australian Centre for the Arts and Technology.
I also learnt a lot from my fellow students in Canberra and it really felt like a close-knit community there, amongst both the performance and composition students. Many things happened face to face, and there wasn’t the technology we have today such as social media, recorded lectures online, notation software, online music streaming services, and electronic media players such as iPods and smart phones!
It’s really a privilege to be studying music now. I feel I have gained the maturity I needed to come back to it; and the technological advances I mentioned have changed the landscape of tertiary music education for the better. How easy it is to be able to transcribe your music electronically instead of by hand! We’re incredibly lucky and we’re also learning from skilled and knowledgeable creative people, who understand the unique challenges of composing and having your work heard in the 21st Century.
The intention behind your work is to write music related to ‘the natural world, human consciousness and emotions’. Why are these themes that are meaningful to you?
I feel drawn to nature. I grew up in a small town in north-east Victoria, and so my childhood was one of adventuring into the bush and growing up in a peaceful, country area full of trees and places to run around. There is so much strength, beauty and fragility in nature that I feel there is much inspiration to be drawn from it!
One of the works to be performed at the concert is called Before Dawn. I was out before sunrise one morning to record magpies singing, and I felt this incredible quiet and stillness in the darkness. Then the light slowly changes, the birds wake up, and things shift into the day. The ideas in this piece brewed for a while and then I was ready to make them into something and represent those happenings in nature.
I’m also curious about the human psyche and emotions. I suppose I feel there is loads of material there for musical exploration; and I also feel strongly that I can only write about the things that I experience personally, rather than things that happen outside of that.
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