BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Remember reading about Gabrielle Cadenhead in our Rural Commuters series?
The young flautist travels between Maitland and Sydney (more than two hours one-way) to pursue her career in music. And, judging by her upcoming performance in the Extended Play Festival of New Music, we’d say her dedication is paying off.
Her involvement in the festival comes after her selection as the Newcastle Youth Orchestra’s 2016 composer-in-residence, and further achievements as one of four artists in the 2017 Sydney Chamber Opera’s Composition Masterclass.
This August 25, she’ll present Echo for poetry and solo flute as part of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music festival event ConCreative.
But the really special part? She wrote the poem herself. And she wrote the flute music herself. And she will perform both of these creative elements on her own.
Gabrielle chats with us about Echo. It was premiered in St Stephen’s Uniting Church in May and intimately explores her connection to her faith. But the composer explains why it’s a work that can also be enjoyed by audiences of no, or any, religion.
Disclaimer: CutCommon supports healthy dialogue among all individuals in our community, and as a publication does not promote any singular faith or religious view.
Gabrielle, last time we spoke saw you feature in our Rural Commuters series. Tell us a little bit about how life has been treating you in the time since!
I am still performing with Sydney Youth Orchestras’ Symphonic Wind Orchestra, and have retained my position as principal flute this year. In October last year, I conducted SWO for the premiere of my first wind orchestral piece, Fractals and Shadows.
It was a learning experience for all involved: for me as a composer and beginner conductor, learning how to convey my own musical ideas clearly (and buying my own baton!); and for the ensemble as they navigated some new music techniques they hadn’t previously encountered. (You can listen to Fractals and Shadows here.)
The commute between Sydney and the Hunter Valley is less frequent these days, so I probably can’t classify myself as ‘rural’ anymore, although the Hunter is one of the places I call home.
Now, we’re touching base ahead of your Extended Play event later this month! It’ll showcase your own music based on a poem you’ve written. What is this poem all about, and what does it mean to you?
In this work, I am poet, composer, and performer. So it’s the height of multitasking, and the poem describes my experience of practising flute in a church. It is an incredible feeling to be alone in a church, and when equipped with an instrument that can fill the space with sound, this carries a certain power.
For me, this represents a profound connection with God, and the deep sense of home I feel in a church. The majority of my life has been spent living next door to churches, attending church at least once a week, and using church spaces for music practice. These feelings I captured in a poem in 2017, entitled Echo, and the next logical step was to construct a solo flute piece to further reflect on this concept. This poem and the resulting flute piece will be performed alongside each other at Extended Play.
These walls –
they know things.
Confidential things.
Joyous things,
crying things,
empowering things;
screaming for justice things.
And they throw sound back at me.
(This is an excerpt from the poem Echo – read it in full on Gabby’s blog here.)
This poem reveals a personal religious experience for you. How would you also encourage people of other or no religions to enjoy and access your work in this secular setting?
From a secular perspective, this poem is about how histories collide in spaces like a church, and how we enter into a space’s story just by being present. This is particularly poignant when we consider the communities which have formed in and around such spaces, and the traditions they perpetuate.
Breath is such a universal human thing, and playing a wind instrument in a space where so many have breathed and created music before really does present a kaleidoscope of moments. Such things could be said of any building, religious or non-religious. Although, of course, this poem is written in the context of a Christian community, which congregates and makes music for the purpose of worshipping God.
Why is it important for you to be able to express yourself across two different artforms – composition and poetry?
I decided I was a writer before I decided I was a composer, but both music and words have been hugely important throughout my life. I fell in love with novels and movie soundtracks, and from an early age set about trying to make them my own.
Writing is always my first port-of-call when expressing some particular emotion that I need to capture. This is where most of my poetry happens, although my prose is generally better thought-out in advance. When words fail, I pick up my flute or sit at a piano and improvise until I am ready to face the world again.
To make my writing suitable enough for eyes other than my own, I then set about hacking away at clichés until I have finessed the words into something I am proud of. Composing, I approach more methodically. My compositional ideas always spawn from concepts beyond music – often from literature, social justice causes, or the natural world – and then I apply my compositional toolbox of modes, motifs, and tone colours until I have created a piece of music I feel authentically reflects the original concept.
Knowing that you explore both of these disciplines, what is the benefit to bringing them together for one piece? How does this intersection reveal your identity and character as an artist?
Echo really brings together all the parts of me, in terms of artistic practice. To be able to pair a poem that expresses something deeply personal and important to me with music I composed for my own instrument feels incredibly authentic.
Because the poem describes how I feel when playing my flute in a church, it was only fitting that I would compose a solo flute piece to sit alongside it. The two aspects together make one cohesive whole, and they are inseparable companions.
And in Extended Play, you’ll be playing your piece on your own – as solo flute, right? How do you prepare yourself to present an original (and personal) composition?
Practising my own work is more difficult than my usual practice in some ways, and less difficult in others. I composed this piece in a very improvisatory process – with flute, pencil, and manuscript paper – before wrestling with notation software to realise the sounds I wanted in the score.
The notation process was possibly more difficult than practising. The danger when practising my own piece is to become complacent. Thoughts like ‘no one else knows what it sounds like’ have the habit of appearing in my mind. Competing with those thoughts is my perfectionist streak. I know the piece well and intimately, having performed it before and generated the material in the first place, but there is always something that needs polishing.
Of course, on top of playing flute, I am practising speaking the poem, which will precede the flute part of the work. This might be harder than the rest of the performance, as I am much more comfortable behind a flute than a microphone.
What do you hope all audience members will gain from this experience?
I hope that the audience will be transported to the church described in this work, or another space in which they can experience this collision of histories. I also hope they will encounter sounds they haven’t heard before, or that they didn’t know the flute could produce. I hope they will feel the narrative arc and purpose of the music as they embark on this journey through breath, space, and time with me.
Listen to Echo as part of ConCreative this August 25 in the City Recital Hall. Other composers in this event include Solomon Frank, Bree van Reyk, and Ben Robinson. See the full details and artist line-up online.
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