BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Composition is often described as a solitary activity. And although it’s a process that can indeed be undertaken in isolation, things get a little different when that isolation is enforced by the government at the height of a global pandemic.
In this interview series, we partner up with Australian composers — emerging and established — who are continuing to write music from their home studios while in lockdown.
Rather than taking for granted the independent nature of composition, we’d like to celebrate composers’ abilities to keep creating when they are working in an industry that is facing collapse in this unfamiliar and high-stress environment.
To launch this series, we chat with composer Jamie Moffatt. Jamie, like many of the other composers you’ll meet in this series, is working on a new piece of music for The Australian Voices. The group, led by Gordon Hamilton, has commissioned an impressive 22 composers to make music during this challenging time.
In their life pre-COVID-19, Jamie had studied vocal performance at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, and had sung with the State Opera of South Australia, Co-Opera Inc, and The Australian Voices. They also founded Elephant in the Room Productions and the 6 Feet Apart Music Collective.
Hi there, Jamie. Thank you so much for taking part in our interview series. First up, talk me through your workstation at the moment.
No worries! It’s a pleasure. Before lockdown, I had access to a free audio studio that the Port Adelaide Enfield Council made available through the libraries — support your local library, folks! So while I already own most of the equipment I need to work with in my home, I would usually leave the house to work with their setup instead to get a more strict dividing line between work and home. Now, I’ve basically cannibalised the spare bedroom to make a home studio setup.
I’ve got a fairly bare-bones setup at the moment with my laptop, sheet music engraving software, DAW software, and a condenser microphone and interface setup. Luckily, there’s also a whole heap of sewing supplies that can act as soundproofing in there already.
If I need to muck around with an instrument to test out melodies or chord progessions and voicings, I have a piano in a different room. I’m hoping to upgrade soon if this state of affairs looks like it’s going to continue for much longer.
There has been a lot of pressure in our community to do things while in lockdown — to take this opportunity to spend more time on creative projects. How do you feel about this? And do you feel there is a bigger expectation placed on composers to create, when considering the way people look at your profession as a solitary and highly expressive activity to begin with?
To be brutally honest, I resent that pressure a fair bit. My inner critic won’t let me rest, and to an extent neither will wider society. There’s an expectation to be productive, but especially for people who are also live artists like myself. A lot of us are experiencing the sudden death of careers we’ve spent literal decades building. Maybe something will rise from the ashes of that, but for now that’s a true loss. We need to be allowed the time to grieve before we’re expected to leap right back into work.
Speaking from my composer side, even in times before COVID-19, ensembles would put out a call for scores and would sometimes even charge a submission fee to be able to be considered for a commission, which I know for some will seem like I’m complaining that the sky is blue; it’s just the way it is. But it’s important to me to state that creative work is real work. It often isn’t valued as such, but the world doesn’t have to be that way.
Tell me a little about your workflow when it comes to the creative projects you are continuing to push through during this time.
Besides staring resentfully at a blank page, willing the notes to write themselves, you mean?
To be honest, the workflow is weirdly the same in the studio at the library as it is at home. I’ve got a step-by-step process for how to write a piece of music:
- First, I choose or write a text, and think about how that text might influence the melody and its contours.
- Then, I write a melody and play with harmonisations for a while before suddenly deciding I hate the text I’ve chosen, and pick or write another.
- At this point I agonise about how that completely ruins the scansion of the syllables, and yell at my screen.
- Then, the sheet music engraving software will usually crash with perfect comic timing — usually because I’ve tried something as taxing and unreasonable as saving the file, or copying a bar and pasting it — so I throw it all out in a fit of pique, and that rage energy will fuel me to somehow go into a fugue state and write an entirely new piece from scratch in about half an hour.
- I’ll take a coffee break in triumph, then realise I hate it and fish the original out of the recycle bin, and cannibalise the best bits from the new piece.
Rinse, repeat, eventually I have a piece of music I’m happy to show to my best friend who will suggest a fix that was so completely obvious I’ll feel like an absolute failure of a musician and swear to quit the industry entirely.
I never do.
Jamie, that is the most realistic representation of creative process anyone has been brave enough to outline in such detail. Now, on a compositional level, how would you say your music itself has been influenced by the external world?
In a couple of ways. There’s the more explicitly related side where I’ve written a few comedy/cabaret-style pieces for singer and piano that directly address the absurdities of a world under quarantine, but it’s impossible for such an all-pervasive event like this not to also change the types of works you’re inspired to create in more subtle ways.
For example, outside of the Far and Near project I’m doing with The Australian Voices, I’ve written a few pieces now where I’ve gravitated towards transitioning back and forth between large, desolate soundscapes and erratic rhythmic sections. Maybe, in a way, that’s a musical reflection of the loneliness and the anxiety I’m feeling.
Let’s talk more about Far and Near — one of the projects you’re undertaking during this lockdown period. How did you get involved?
The simplest way, actually. I’m a member of The Australian Voices. I’ve historically not been in what is sometimes called the ‘core group’ that rehearses weekly, because I don’t live in Brisbane. But I was set to perform with a sub-ensemble of TAV at the Four Winds Easter Festival just outside of Bermagui before the government announced on March 18th the cancellation of any event of more than 100 people.
In the group chat for that tour group, the eight of us were discussing the closures and how we might fight to keep whatever scraps of the industry alive that we could. Gordon Hamilton, our director, mentioned something at that point about how fighting for the arts should include commissioning composers.
The next day, I had an email in my inbox. TAV has always had a strong culture of finding opportunities to foster new and existing talent from within its own ranks, and one of the really exciting things I’ve felt about Far and Near is that healthy mix of established and emerging talent.
I’m fairly green as a composer, but Gordon’s always been aware of my dabblings in the field. To be one of the emerging composers included alongside big names like Katie Noonan and Nico Muhly is obviously incredibly meaningful.
So what does it mean to you to still be able to work during COVID-19?
In a word: Everything.
I miss people, I miss working, and I miss performing. From an emotional standpoint, this project is obviously a very important outlet for me. Careerwise, it’s exciting and special to be a part of, and the security having the work gives me is invaluable.
In a way, I’ve actually got a bit of ‘career survivor’s guilt’ over it all. I’ve always struggled with impostor syndrome as an artist, and I see so many people out there doing it tough. That said, I also look at this work I’m doing and I truly think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever created. That helps with convincing myself I do deserve this after all.
The project’s artistic director Gordon Hamilton has said in a release that the theme of this project “speaks to the current trauma enveloping the world”. What’s your composition about, and how does it respond to this theme?
My composition is called The Hour and the Clime and is meant to musically evoke the ways in which being separated from loved ones by physical distance can obscure the ways we try to communicate sincere feeling. Without touch, or vocal tone, or a kind facial expression, we can often say things we don’t realise we’re saying.
Part of the way I’ve sought to capture that is by weaving throughout it a collection of anonymised messages that have been submitted between people who are or have been in long-distance relationships, capturing snippets of love, heartbreak, and even just the mundanities of watching a movie together over the internet.
The melody is setting of Emily Dickinson’s poem Longing is Like the Seed, which also covers this theme.
It must be a unique situation: you’re composing a work that will one day be performed — but who knows when? How do you keep the drive and motivation to keep working on live music, even though it may be quite some time before that live music can be played?
I’m sure every composer has written a piece they don’t know when or if it will be performed. But you’re right, the uniqueness of how this definitely will get to see an audience at some point — but for it to be in this weird COVID-19 limbo in the meantime — is definitely a new experience. It’s a day-by-day thing, I guess.
In many ways, I do this work because I literally can’t not do it. Many who know me will tell you I’m incapable of having an idea in the privacy of my own head and just letting it live or die there.
Speaking of ideas, what else are you up to at the moment?
I also work as a singer and producer, so I’ve been organising a lot of just-for-fun virtual choir projects with friends. I have a particular project I want to do that’s kind of in that sphere that unfortunately is beyond the scope of that type of volunteer/hobby musicianship, so I’m waiting on some grant applications to see if it can go ahead.
Other than that, I’m caught up on my backlog of books I said I’d always get around to reading, my black mage just reached the level cap [in Final Fantasy], and my favourite lounge chair has a tripod with a phone mount on it so I can video-chat with friends.
At the end of the day, how do you predict the pandemic will impact the Australian music industry — and what are your hopes for its future?
To be blunt, it’s going to decimate us. A lot of careers will end. Already, hundreds of millions of dollars has been lost by the Australian music industry and where government should be stepping in to support us, we’re having to support each other instead.
The Australia Council for the Arts and state departments like Arts South Australia have instituted response grants, and those are great. But the ways in which workers within the arts have been allowed to slip through the gaps of wider relief packages is galling, especially when you consider how the arts sector stepped up to support victims of the recent bushfires, and the ways in which so many of us stuck at home are all consuming arts and entertainment just to get through the day.
That said, artists are also a resilient lot. You can see some of that in the incredible innovation that’s going on to allow people to continue to make art at home. There will still be art, great art even, once this is over. And I hope that while people are locked up at home, their appetite for live music is growing so there might be a boom in the sector once it’s safe. I know personally, the first time I get back on a stage, I’ll have a hard time not letting it overwhelm me. I hope the audiences are as eager for that moment, that first time back, as I am.
Find out more about The Australian Voices’ 22-composer initiative Far and Near on the website.
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Images supplied. Jamie captured by Jack Parker Photography.
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