BY JENNY DUCK-CHONG, HALCYON
This year, Halcyon celebrates its 20th birthday. In this photoblog, artistic director Jenny Duck-Chong reflects on the occasion as she shares a visual journey of the highlights of her Australian vocal music initiative.
There are so many amazing moments to look back on during the past 20 years of performing, promoting, and producing with Halcyon; but here are some significant milestones and memories from these two decades.
1. 1992, before it all begins…
This is our very first homegrown photoshoot before we’d even launched Halcyon: two intrepid and enterprising young singers recently out of university and on the start of a long journey, dreaming of the future, and ready to step out on a fairly uncharted path and forge careers as singers specialising in new music.
Our first concert of contemporary chamber music took place the next year (as did the birth of my first child), but we didn’t find our name for some years to come.
2. 1998, the birth of Halcyon
Halcyon’s first performance was a co-presentation with one of the leading new music groups Sydney Alpha Ensemble and young conductor Antony Walker.
Brazen enough to approach this eminent ensemble, we wanted our first show to be a memorable one, and it was: astounding colleagues, great artists, and a program of masterworks all recorded by the ABC. Not a bad way to begin!
Back then, we had the very uninspiring name of Music for Voices and Instruments (what were we thinking?!). But we did have newly designed logo and a cleverly constructed circular ticket with a great font!
3. 2001, time for photos
This was our first professional photoshoot by photographer Michael Chetham. It’s become the enduring image of the two heads of Halcyon’s co-founders and directors, Alison Morgan (soprano) and I (mezzo-soprano), and the face of our ongoing Waves EP series, featuring new Australian releases.
Somehow, Michael managed to capture different facets of our personalities, and yet bring out a direct engagement and serenity that has also been a hallmark of our performing personas.
4. 2001, part 2
This was a significant year: the year of our first concert series and our first commission, a really beautiful song cycle by Claire Jordan called Memory.
Although there was a wealth of rarely performed vocal chamber music that we had been discovering in our exploration of libraries, publishers, and other catalogues, we knew we wanted to be part of not just the presentation of existing pieces, but the creation of new works; to help cultivate a living and growing collection of chamber songs.
5. 2002 brings the first demo album
We recorded our first demo album, an eclectic snapshot of the repertoire from our first concert series (featuring two movements from Claire Jordan’s newly commissioned work alongside extracts by Ross Edwards, Gillian Whitehead, George Crumb, Joseph Schwantner and John Tavener). This already showed the hallmarks of our programming: fantastic music drawn from Australia and overseas for a changing line-up of excellent players.
From the outset, we placed high importance on producing recordings to promote this music we loved, but our graphics have since improved a lot!
6. 2003 with places and people
This photo reminds me of two things: we have performed in many places, and been supported by many people.
We have never had a fixed venue for our performances, continually finding and making new spaces our home be they grand stages, institutions, concert halls, churches, recording studios, or private homes.
We have also had the support of an extraordinary array of people. Stuart & Sons generously loaned to us this gorgeous Stuart piano for the Earth Jewels program, played here by a very young Sally Whitwell.
7. 2004, the first live recordings
For our concert series in 2004, we began to draw on another ongoing aspect of our work: to connect contemporary art music with contemporary visual art. During this year, we featured the work of painter Catherine Abel in our three programs: Close Ups, Sirens, and Dark Love. The Sirens image became our next Halcyon logo. It was also the first year we produced a live recordings series, and all three concerts were released as CDs in the same year.
8. 2005: FLOOF!
FLOOF was one of many collaborative performances with Ensemble Offspring which allowed us to stage larger works with less financial risk (and hopefully larger audiences). But it’s also an example of the unexpected resourcefulness we need to exhibit in staging programs.
One piece by Esa-Pekka Salonen required a particular synthesiser (with a specialised sound card!) which dated to the late ’90s. When I rang the manufacturer to find out where I might find one, they said: ‘Well, we have bits of one out back!’ But I eventually tracked one down on eBay in Redfern, and the owner was kind enough to lend it to us for the performance!
9. 2007 marked the biggest project yet
For the biggest undertaking we had ever been involved in, we collaborated with veteran new music specialists Synergy Percussion and fellow young guns Ensemble Offspring to stage Tehillim. This saw around 1200 people attend exhilarating performances of extraordinary works by Gyorgy Ligeti, Claude Vivier and Damien Ricketson alongside Steve Reich’s joyous Tehillim. It was a memorable series of shows for performers and audience alike, recorded by the ABC for international broadcast, and is still talked about by many as being a inspirational night of new music history.
Conductor Roland Peelman leading the full ensemble with a literal dance in his step (credit Paul Davies).
10. 2007, part 2
In the same concert, I got to perform what has become one of my favourite works, Györgi Ligeti’s Sippal, dobbal, nádihegeduvel(2000), an extraordinary piece of vocal pyrotechnics and a tour-de-force ensemble work for both percussion quartet (supplemented by woodwinds who played recorders, ocarinas, and harmonicas originally assigned to the percussionists!) and singer, each movement of which posed new challenges and a new array of instruments!
It also has some of the best score indications. In the first movement alone, there is ‘deliberate and cruel’, ‘screaming (precise pitches)’ and ‘in an unnatural: belly voice’, but my favourite is found in the second movement. Alongside the tempo indication ‘light, graceful, happy, fast’ (why use one when more will do?), there is the vocal parenthesis that follows ‘(the voice is virtuoso, dangerous, capricious)’. Who wouldn’t want to take on that challenge?
11. 2008, Sirens
This group of singers, formed for a one-off program called Sirens in 2004, developed into an established entity, toured with Musica Viva and grew its own body of repertoire including works commissioned or written for it by Elliott Gyger, Graham Hair, Raffaele Marcellino, and Dan Walker among others, many of which are featured on Halcyon recordings.
After years of music-making in fantastic settings, such as this beautiful Four Winds Festival performance of Tehillim, we even started a book club together, which is still going to this day.
12. 2008, part 2
Cool Black was our first studio album. A collaboration with composer Rosalind Page, it featured three of her beautifully crafted song cycles inspired by French, Icelandic, and Spanish poetry, (including the Paul Lowin Award-winning Sonetos del amor oscuro). It was also the first studio album we had produced with sound engineer Daniel Brown, who has gone on to produce most of Halcyon’s now substantial collection of recordings.
A celebration of a musical affinity and long-standing relationship, the CD is now celebrating its own 10th birthday this year. The cycle Apollinairesongs also featured in our most recent program Shining Shores as part of our 20th birthday celebrations, the first time we have performed it live since 2002.
13. 2009-10 moves Halcyon into the future
In 2010, Halcyon took a huge step forwards technologically when we launched our first website and created our first e-news, to begin the transition from hard copy mail-out promotions. It’s hard to imagine only eight years later running any sort of business now without a website!
Featuring our new logo and a new set of promotional images with the older and more confident faces of Halcyon’s two directors, we designed the site to be visually minimal (in an era when sites used to be quite cluttered). But we also wanted it to be full of information so people could find out not just more about us, but also more about the composers and music that we championed.
The site is now a growing archive of performances, repertoire, recordings, links, and a lot of other interesting information to help people discover more for themselves.
14. 2010, part 2
Our final show for 2010, atmospheres, was one of many collaborative performances we have undertaken over the years, but one of the few featuring live and pre-recorded electronics. Working alongside the veteran ensemble austraLYSIS in a program presented by the New Music Network, it included two particularly substantial pieces:- Kaija Saariaho’s Nuits, Adieux and Trevor Wishart’s Vox 2.
We had performed Saariaho’s extraordinary vocal music in programs since 2002, but the Wishart score took challenging to a whole new level. We spent around six months preparing for this performance, unpacking and deciphering his detailed graphic score, which included instructions on each part for pitch contour (approximate or precise), vowel and consonant production (often at the same time), breathiness factor (graded finely up to 7/8 breath), quantity of vibrato, as well as complex rhythmic material.
Music written for, and developed with, an extraordinary English group called Electric Phoenix, this was one of a cycle of six works but the only one we have managed to stage to date. A mind-bending but exhilarating work to perform.
15. 2011 introduces young composers
This was the year we took on our inaugural young composers project entitled First Stones, and the beginning of our ongoing educational focus.
Working alongside nine young composers and composer-mentor Elliott Gyger, we spent the best part of a year together with seminars in May, workshops in July, and rehearsals and performance in November.
They learned such a lot from us and from each other that it made us eager to find new opportunities to work with emerging composers to help them in particular to craft their vocal writing; a skill they often do not get to do enough of in their own training (or because they don’t always have willing singers to work with them).
Since this point, we have been engaged in presentations, seminars, and composition projects for secondary and tertiary students and their teachers, sharing our skill and passion with another generation of musicians.
In the past few years, I have also started doing one-on-one mentoring for young composers and hope this will be an area that continues to develop in the future.
16. 2013, The Journeys
The Journeys was a magical and memorable semi-outdoor performance in NIDA’s Atrium space, presented in a roofed space, but open to the air at the front and rear; the hanging drapes billowing in the gentle spring breeze.
A chance to explore the intersection of projection and music, the premiere of Raffaele Marcellino’s A Strange Kind of Paradise (now featured on our Waves III EP) for four voices and harp featured projections by video artist Michael Bates. Gillian Whitehead’s monumental work Nga Haerenga, a multi-movement piece depicting several epic journeys, was enhanced by simple textural projections. This piece was our introduction to Whitehead’s music: Alison and I worked closely alongside her in the preparations for the premiere in 2000, and have since staged it twice with Halcyon.
Scored for four female voices, percussion, and narrator, we not only sing but create soundscapes of bird calls, ice, and wind or penguins and elephant seals.
We were fortunate in this performance to work alongside percussionist Claire Edwardes and Tony Llewellyn Jones, and we discovered he was not only a consummate actor but also a very capable musician, able to follow the intricate score cues and indications as he brought to life passages from Shackleton’s diary.
The performance was captured on video and can be seen on our YouTube channel here.
17. 2013-15 was party time!
In 2013, Halcyon turned 15 and to celebrate this milestone we approached many composers we had worked with over the years to see if they would like to write a short song for our Kingfisher birthday project, (inspired by the one of the meanings of the word Halcyon). We were astonished when 21 composers said yes!
We previewed a handful of these works at our birthday party at the MCA in 2013, and then presented all the pieces in two programs in early 2014, interspersing the pieces with a short audio recording of the composers.
You can now listen to these insights on our YouTube channel here. This gorgeous-looking CD was the culmination of this mammoth commissioning project and was released in late 2015 through Tall Poppies.
We’re so proud of this wonderful showcase of Australian contemporary vocal writing, and grateful to all those composers for their very generous gifts.
18. 2014-16 commemmorates WW1
Another substantial compositional project War Letters was developed with composer Diana Blom to commemorate the anniversary of World War One.
Drawing their texts from real-life letters of those serving in wartime, the pieces gave moving insights into the personal effects of war through the compositional voices of four generations of Australian composers.
It was sobering for all to realise that those writing their letters home were probably not much older than the students in the high school audience. Though the words were written a century earlier, they seemed to speak so directly to a modern audience.
Presented in concert and for schools in 2014, and recorded at University of Western Sydney after the performances, the CD was released in 2016 and an education kit is in progress.
19. 2018, and times are changing
In 2015, although Alison continued appearing as a guest performer, I took over as Halcyon’s sole director and began to think about ways I might want to shape the ensemble for the future. Apart from our concert performances and recording projects, I knew I wanted to find new ways to share the music we perform with a wider audience.
In 2016, I launched the YouTube channel to feature live performance video and other media. Then in 2018, a series of threads came together: my desire to create more educational material, the close relationships we had been developing with composers over many years, my love of a good chat, and my daughter’s skill with video. This led to the creation of Halcyon’s new video series In Conversation With…,.
This labour-of-love project is designed to give short, bite-sized insights from the composers about their work, with a particular focus on writing for the voice. But it is also a way for anyone to find a way in to the music they write and we perform, through engaging with the human being behind the work.
What you discover when you watch them is an array of personalities who think and articulate about themselves and their work so differently. These interviews demonstrate that new music is not just one thing, it’s as diverse as the people who write it.
So far, there are four composers featured on the channel, but we now have seven more interviews completed and in process for future uploads, as well as more composers to interview!
20. The now
As mentioned back in 2004, our desire to connect visual art with contemporary art music had long been a focus, and many original artworks have been part of our media for decades as well as performances and launches in various galleries alongside visual artworks.
Many ensembles have sought to take concert music out of its predictable environments, and to experiment and breathe a freshness into the presentation and remove expectations of behaviour from audiences.
After many years of conversations and unrealised planning (you’ve no idea how many ideas do not make it off the planning table!), this year I created Halcyon’s own version, art:music, in collaboration with Artsite Galleries.
I believed a contemporary visual art audience could be willing to engage with contemporary art music if they were given the opportunity in a place and format they felt comfortable to try. So we presented intimate miniatures in short brackets with no concert rules to adhere to, and invited those who were ‘artistically curious’ to join us.
The event was a huge success with around 75 per cent of the attendees never having listened to music like this before, and all saying they would come back.
There are plans underway for more of these events in the new year.
It’s great to look back and see what we have created, and been part of creating, over the past 20 years; and to bring some of the best bits to light again.
But 2018 has not just been a year for remembering the past, but also a chance to celebrate new developments. Alongside the concerts and YouTube composers series this year, we have also released three new CDs featuring some extraordinary new vocal music by Andrew Schultz, Elliott Gyger, Raffaele Marcellino, and Nigel Butterley, including several award-winning works.
It has been a wonderful year, and a real celebration of the music we have championed and the composers who have created it, which is why we began the group all those years ago.
Shout Jenny a coffee?
We reckon she deserves one after such a big celebration. If you like, you can shout her a coffee (or even a fancy meal) to say thanks for sharing her Halcyon story.
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