BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Brand new music, written by living Australian composers, and performed on the recorder?
It’s certainly not your typical gig, and that’s why we’re into it.
Aptly titled Muse, the Sydney Opera House event will see inspiring recorder virtuoso Alicia Crossley launch her latest album through a series of Australian premieres written for her instrument and string quartet.
The Acacia Quartet will join her on stage to play the music of an extraordinary line-up of local composers: Lyle Chan, Sally Whitwell, Anne Boyd, Chris Williams, Stephen Yates, and Jessica Wells.
Speaking of Jessica Wells, we caught up with this composer to learn all about the process of writing a new work for this instrumentation (and in such fine musical company).
Jessica, tell us about your music for recorder and string quartet. Why did you want to embark on the composition process for this instrumentation?
Alicia and I first met at a PLEXUS performance (with Lyle Chan at the wine bar after the gig!), and the commission came from her not long afterwards for recorder and string quartet, which I thought was a great combination to write for. Having Acacia involved was also a big bonus! So happy to be writing for them all.
In a beautiful video about the concert, I saw you give us a little hint of your work Copenhagen Christmas. It sounds lovely! Why did you want to take the opportunity to write a Christmas-themed work for this event?
At the time of writing, I was situated in Copenhagen, in a small apartment in the city, and I felt compelled to write a two-movement work about my environment there over the Christmas period. The Danes are the best at Christmas! I spent days in the famous Tivoli Gardens soaking up all the (fake) snow (global warming??) and Christmas markets, drinking mulled wine and trying all the Christmas goodies at the stalls, my kids going on rides and enjoying the wonderful atmosphere!
The Nisse of the first movement are the little Santa-like elves that are mischievous little creatures. If you leave out some rice pudding for them on Christmas Eve, you might be rewarded! This movement is full of quirky pizzicato and cheeky staccato phrases, which evoke these cute pointy-hatted and fuzzy-moustached critters.
One of your movements is about how warm it feels to be inside as the festive season sheds snow on the outside…but in Australia, this takes on a new meaning! Why do you feel that people who live in Australia still have such a strong connection to that cosy Christmas feeling, when our landscape provides us with such a unique December experience?
I grew up in New York, so the cold Christmas was something that was part of my childhood. I still can’t get used to Australian summer Christmases, and I arrived in Sydney in 1985! So those first 10 years of life with cold Christmases will never leave me. It’s a part of my longing for my childhood, I guess, that drove some of the ideas for this piece. Even when I’m sitting sweltering in the hot Sydney heat, I love hearing carols about Let it Snow!
The second movement Hygge (pronounced ‘hooga’) was indeed written whilst cosied up in the apartment with some actual flecks of snowflakes going past the window, and my kids lighting lots of candles to get that snug atmosphere for which the Danes made a special word for. The music actually represents the candles at the opening and closing. I use very long notes which ‘flicker’ with tiny grace notes, musically representing the light of the candles ‘guttering’. The middle of this movement moves into a flowing minor key and depicts my walks around the old city sights of Copenhagen – ancient buildings such as the Round Tower where astronomer Tycho Brahe made his observations of the heavens. It becomes ecstatic and wondrous and then as I return to my warm apartment, the candles beckon once again.
The other works on the program will have different themes, but for the same instrumentation, and all are composed by your contemporaries. How do you feel about this experience of generating new music as part of a community of composers, all coming together for one event?
This collection of works is truly unique: each voice so very different! It makes for a very interesting listening experience, and delves into the personality of each of the composers, especially when contrasting with each other’s different styles. It’s a wondrous thing and Alicia has been so generous in proving the commissions and the recording opportunity, and I hope she gets the support from the audience and new music lovers to continue this amazing work. Some absolutely beautiful work has come out of this project.
I was so happy to be involved in helping to produce the recordings of the pieces for the CD, and so I was able to really soak in all of the works in this concert, and enjoy the process of really bringing out their nuances in the recording sessions.
As a composer, how versatile do you find the recorder?
My first instrument was a plastic $2 recorder given to my entire kindergarten class in Brooklyn, New York in 1980. I still have this instrument, and am so grateful that my teacher Mr Koch noticed one day that, upon returning to the classroom of 40 5-year-old kids attempting to play C, D E, I was leaning over to read music from his music stand!
From that point, I was brought into lunchtime rehearsals and my talent nurtured and I played a lot of recorder music. I continued playing in consorts into my conservatorium uni years, and I have always loved early music instruments as well as contemporary music. There’s something of a crossover between them that is really unique.
I hadn’t written for recorder in a long time, so when attempting Nisse I amazingly found it rolling off my brain onto the page with perfect playability. All those years of tooting!
How much did Alicia Crossley take part in the compositional process itself?
Alicia needed to prod me every now and then to keep writing, as I was working on the Commonwealth Games arrangements and Storm Boy (for composer Alan John); and it was hard working in a small apartment with two children watching Netflix rather loudly as I was trying to write on my laptop in the same room with headphones on!
Luckily, everything I sent her was playable and she didn’t need to change much in terms of notes or fingerings. There was one trilled note that ended up being too ‘clacky’ because of a low key being too difficult to tame – that’s probably the only thing we changed in her part!
For the string quartet parts, it was more about timing and changing from pizz to arco, changing some double stops to work better across the ensemble, and general tempo refining. It was so nice to work with Acacia on this, as they took such care with the work and wanted to bring out the tiniest nuances of the piece in rehearsal and in the studio.
Basically everyone was so easy to work with! Heavenly job.
Above: Alicia Crossley will premiere works by Jessica Wells and more in Muse.
How important do you think it is to have concerts like Alicia’s in which diverse and living composers are represented (as opposed to the controversially discussed “dead white men” that so heavily occupy the concert programs)?
So important! I refuse to attend concerts with only dead white male composers listed. I pretty much am not that interested in most music that has already been performed a zillion times. I like to hear new work. New work defines our generation. It speaks to us in our lifetime and reflects our society. It’s living art. Dead people’s music is brought to life in amazing ways by living people, and young people should hear those seminal works too as part of their education. But if we can’t also respect the work of living composers enough to give them a fair go, we are ignoring an important facet of our history. The history that we make every day.
Listen to Jessica Wells’ Copenhagen Christmas when you attend Muse featuring Alicia Crossley and the Acacia Quartet. The concert will take place at the Sydney Opera House, 3pm December 8. You can also catch the performers at The Garden Room at Annesley, 3.30pm December 9.
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Images supplied. Jessica Wells captured by Steven Godbee.
