BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Jennifer Hankin has played flute for close to 20 years. And for many of those years, she has needed to advocate for her own physical and mental wellbeing in the Australian health departments she says are stricken with “systemic inequalities”.
The multidisciplinary artist, who also performs as The Emerald Ruby, was recently named one of 15 recipients of the ABC Classic and ABC Jazz 2022 Composer Commissioning Fund. Her project Finding Fondness in a Foreboding World will reveal her experience as an autistic/ADHD composer in Australia.
While the ABC commission will foster five new duets for concert flute (to be recorded by the composer and her mentor Sally Walker), Jennifer’s interests and abilities extend far beyond this instrument alone. She plays winds, strings, percussion, and is determined to become an Otamatone virtuoso. Creatively inspired outside music, Jennifer also pursues photography, fashion design, and other expressive disciplines. She says her “artistic exploits often explore her experiences moving through the world as a late-diagnosed autistic human”.
Jennifer tells CutCommon about her new commission, as well as her newly released album Folksy Dreams Volume 2, and her upcoming involvement with Australian music collective Dots+Loops.
Jennifer, you’re a multi-instrumentalist in the true sense of the term: flutes, glockenspiel, voice, uke, and tin whistles are just a few of the instruments you play! What draws you towards this variety in your music?
I can’t say I ever made a conscious choice to specialise as a Jack of all trades, with a flute focus, rather than flute specialist. It just sort of happened over a period of 10 years. I can however pinpoint a few influential moments that led me down this path.
A few years back, I attended one of Rosalie Bourne’s famous Central Coast Flutation summer schools. One of the mentors on the day was giving a lecture on achieving advanced technical proficiency. The summary of this lecture was learning to play non-Boehm flutes — think recorders, quenas, shakuhachis, baroque flutes, bansuris — help to develop the logic behind the Boehm fingering system. This set me down a path of acquiring many flute family instruments, with the most recent being a basic baroque recorder.
Returning to the baroque music of my early flute years on this instrument has been wild! The choice of keys and dynamics make much more sense, while the technical difficulties caused by modern flute fingering have melted into patterns that make sense.
As for the other instruments — ukulele, glockenspiel, electronics — I began acquiring them for practical business purposes. When I started writing songs back in 2017, I couldn’t afford to employ an associate artist, but I could afford a $100 ukulele! For Folksy Dreams, I couldn’t afford a session musician, so I learnt how to play the glockenspiel. I also couldn’t afford to hire someone to learn the Otamatone for my upcoming Dots+Loops premiere of the work Halt the Hustle, Frolic Forever, so I learnt it myself!
Like a spoken language, once I picked up one auxiliary instrument, developing technical and interpretative proficiency on each subsequent instrument required less time and energy.
I can’t talk about my multi-instrument trajectory without mentioning the folk festival circuit and the live Sydney jazz scene. Most people who run in these circles have a primary instrument and can play a menagerie of secondary instruments. For example, pretty much every jazz saxophonist I know can play a little clarinet, flute, and piano, and sometimes a little trumpet too. Likewise, almost every folk fiddler I know can play banjo, mandolin, guitar, and double bass — if they really have to.
Such a full range of instruments feature on your EP Folksy Dreams Volume 2, which you first introduced to me as “an exercise in compositional simplicity and play”. Tell us a bit about this — how you begin to approach the idea of simplicity, especially with so many instruments involved!
At its core, the Folksy Dreams series is for 10-year-old Jen, writing music she’d enjoy playing, and developing a method to encourage her passion for writing. I came to the flute at 10 after a years-long obsession with the music from Lord of the Dance. There was something about the lilt, the modal tonalities, and of course the variety of flutes that lit up my synapses in the best way.
I’ve been playing flute for almost 20 years now, and I’m still obsessed with Irish folk music. You’ll catch glimpses of musical infatuation sprinkled throughout my entire recording portfolio, my favourite being a lick I snuck into a recording session with Othrship many years back, heard at 0:55 in the song Cuckoo..
To write these tiny folk tunes, I used a technique I call the Brunch Method. This is a technique I’ve developed over a long timeframe, and tested on beginner students aged 9-50 . This method focuses on a single diatonic tonality, limited rhythmic palette, and harmony as a melodic support rather than a boundary-pushing artistic mechanism. In its simplest form, someone who’s never read notation before can generate a pleasing tune in 30 minutes, or the concept can be expanded to encompass a complex composition practice like my own.
The Brunch Method is a reaction against the idea that modern classical music must push every boundary, even to the point of becoming unlistenable; a philosophy that was often pushed upon me in my undergrad composition lessons, and headspace that’s taken me 10 years to recover from artistically.
I’ve made the sheet music to the title track of Folksy Dreams Vol.2, Spring Brings the Clover, available as a free download. I’ve chosen to deliver this score as a lead sheet, because I see the melody as the only ‘really important’ part of this piece. Instrumentation, arrangement, even the harmony, that’s all up to the performer/s. If I were to record Spring Brings the Clover again, the arrangement and instrumentation would most certainly change!
Beyond these traditionally folksy instruments you love, lately you’ve ventured into unusual ones, such as GameBoy and Otamatone. What are you learning about how limitless music can be?
It’s cliche, but the more I learn about the rules of music, the better able I am to break them!
I’ve spent a significant chunk of 2022 questioning how we categorise music. I’d started this questioning before receiving the Dots+Loops composer fellowship, but writing for the very open brief ‘6 minutes of electronics and percussion’ really sent me down the ‘what even is style and genre?’ rabbit hole!
Sometimes, I feel like the musical experiences provided during my time at the University of Newcastle have foreshadowed my current writing in unusual ways. I started writing for GameBoy and flute to fulfil the ‘experimental electronic’ performance and composition components that were woven between our traditional classical music learning. Likewise, my very first Otamatone performance was during a first-year improvisation class.
When I finished my degree, these unconventional skills I’d picked up took a back seat to everything else. However, as I’ve continued to ask the questions, ‘What makes classical music classical music?’, and ‘What is a serious virtuosic instrument?’, I’ve found a new confidence to explore outside my primary instrument in radical ways.
Your work has led you to achieve something extraordinary this year: a new ABC commission of your work called Finding Fondness in a Foreboding World, which will be five duets for concert flute. I’d love to hear the story behind this title.
Finding Fondness in a Foreboding World is a series of musical reflections expressed in the instrumentation — flute duet — I’ve continually felt drawn towards as a composer.
I was diagnosed with autism in 2017, and ADHD in 2021. Since receiving these diagnoses, I’ve been able to identify exactly which systems (pretty much all of them) let me down in what ways (almost every way). Each piece comments on an experience I’ve had living as a disabled person in Australia, and makes something beautiful from the pain and distress.
In a statement for ABC, you said this work reflects your personal experience in mental health and disability, and the “systemic inequalities” you’ve needed to confront in the past 20 years. How would you define these inequalities?
Too many social, political, and financial structures in our society are built to make sure only those who ‘truly deserve it’ receive support. I became aware of this reality as I began to navigate Australian healthcare, social services such as the NDIS and Centrelink, education spaces, and the music industry.
I have big existential questions that need answers better than, ‘that’s how we’ve always done it’. How did we as a nation decide who deserves support, and how did we get to that conclusion? We have the resources, knowledge, and technology to provide an equitable existence for everyone, yet it hasn’t happened. Why? Because of the glacial pace of politics? Because those at the top hoard the wealth? Because if everyone makes a living wage and is guaranteed food and housing, who’ll want to work anymore? I’ve had to fight tooth and nail for appropriate health care, yet others can’t even access it. Why is my terrible experience actually pretty good in the grand scheme of things?
The knowledge and lived experience that sparked these questions with their accompanying feelings is too much for a single brain. If I were to keep them in, I’d bubble over. So I channel the urge to spend my days screaming ‘it’s just not fair’ into the void into my music instead. Capturing the awful in a clever title and beautiful melody helps me find a calm.
That calm means I can advocate publicly through my music, online presence, and Musicians Australia for tangible change that will benefit everyone, not just those who already benefit from the inequalities grandfathered into our so-called modern society.
How would you describe the experience of being an advocate for your own health journey when you’ve felt the system has not always supported you?
I wish my advocacy work wasn’t necessary. It’s exhausting, it’s demoralising, but if it doesn’t get done nothing will change.
I think my experience navigating the NDIS is a good example. Having access to the proper disability support through the NDIS has been lifechanging. However, the system fought hard to keep me out, and then every year demands more proof that my lifelong condition is still disabling — as if one can grow out of autism!
As I’ve yelled from any rooftop I can about my experience navigating this, I’ve found validation and solidarity in the most wonderful disabled artists’ community. If not for them, I fear I would have withered beneath the weight of systemic ableism long ago.
Jennifer, you also work in an industry — the arts — which itself contains systemic inequalities and issues regarding acknowledgement and support for artists’ mental and physical health. How do you feel that working in the arts industry has been to your benefit as we think about art as expression or therapy — or caused you further challenges when considering the difficulties artists face?
My multidisciplinary arts practice keeps me sane, yet the realities of owning a freelance music business and working towards becoming a full-time composer/performer regularly cause overwhelming damage to my mental and physical health.
Currently, I subsidise the very little income I make through composing and performing by teaching flute. I enjoy teaching well enough, but it’s not my forever job. Over the past few years, it’s become harder to manage my full-time arts practice and part-time teaching jobs.
I don’t want to give up my arts practice, but there is a real future where I may have to choose between the relative financial stability of flute teaching and the overwhelming call I feel towards my music career. I feel particularly resentful towards the industry at the moment as I watch my peers either quit or deprioritise their arts work in favour of financial or family stability and/or health. No one should have to choose between their health, finances, family, and arts practice. But the systems which claim to ‘boost the skilled and worthy’ fail to account for differences in privilege that allow some performers to master their instruments and art forms at strikingly young ages, but force others into the never-ending cycle of having to prioritise paid work to keep a roof over one’s head and food on the table over artistic mastery.
If I leave arts work, it wasn’t a choice, it was because I ran out of time to make it my primary source of income before my body and mind could no longer cope.
How do you intend your ABC project to be received? Is it designed for you, the health system, the audience? What message will you be sharing?
This set of flute duets are for two audiences: every person who’s ever been rejected by the system, to let them know I see them and that they’re not alone. This release is also for those who’ve never thought about the systems that govern our lives. Systems tend to be invisible to those who aren’t impacted by them. It matters that these systems become visible, and I really hope my music brings some much-needed visibility to the systems.
The support and visibility the ABC will provide this project means so much. As an independent musician, my work often goes unseen, again because the systems that govern the music industry see those of us without ‘representation’ either as unimportant or as risky in a business sense. With the ABC’s support, I really hope this work can be heard by others, and make them feel less alone and bring more visibility to disabled realities.
Thanks Jennifer. Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I have many shows planned and in the works for the end of this year and for next year, most excitingly NONSTOP on 18 of December in Brisbane with Dots+Loops!
If any readers enjoyed my music and live in the areas I perform semi-frequently — Sydney, Newcastle, Melbourne, Brisbane — I need them to come to my shows and book pre-sales! I know pretty much every artist is banging on about it, but pre-sales enable musicians to take risks with their writing, touring, and allow them to play more shows.
I also have a few exciting releases planned for 2023, including a mystery commission project and an EP of eclectic folk songs.
Keep up to date with Jennifer Hankin’s shows and projects on Instagram and Facebook. Visit the ABC for more information on the ABC Classic and ABC Jazz 2022 Composer Commissioning Fund.
Images supplied.
