BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
The entire nature of our industry has shifted. Living and working through the pandemic, Australia’s musicians have been forced to rethink their approach to projects, and reschedule live events. Yet they are proving they have the power to adapt with ingenuity, determination, and creativity.
In this interview series, we document the impact of COVID on the Australian arts industry while facilitating a candid discussion about what it is like to work during this difficult time. We hope this series will bring hope and solidarity to our creative community – things we need now more than ever.
Needing help during COVID-19? Contact your GP, Lifeline on 13 11 14, or the Support Act Wellbeing Helpline on 1800 959 500.
In this interview, we chat with Wattleseed Ensemble violist Katie Yap. Katie is preparing to perform the program HOME across regional Victoria, alongside cellist Anna Pokorny and violinist Natalia Harvey (pictured below). They hope this tour will finally take place; it’s been postponed three times due to the pandemic.
Katie tells CutCommon how she’s kept her spirits high after facing so many concert cancellations, and why she’s looking forward to performing live — including the world premiere of an Australian composition she commissioned with Wattleseed.
Wattleseed is a new Melbourne ensemble, and it’s had a particularly rough start — you’ve launched during a pandemic. Before we get stuck into the tour, tell us what it’s been like for you in the past year or two.
Good question! I dreamed up Wattleseed Ensemble as part of my Freedman Fellowship application in 2019. Over the past few years, I had fallen head-over-heels in love with the sound of baroque instruments, and I wanted to find a way to use that sound to connect with audiences in a conversation about climate change — a topic that I feel deeply about, but is terribly divisive. Music is such a beautiful way to bring people together, and I hoped I could do that with Wattleseed.
The past few years have been really hard for me. I don’t want to gloss over that fact, as it’s the case for everyone who’s had their work impacted as much as we have in the music scene. Trying to organise concerts and tours, set up an ensemble, and remain creative in such an uncertain landscape was a huge challenge, and one that sent me into some pretty deep spirals at times.
However, the upside of months of lockdown at a time was that it gave me time to think and to really make sure of what I want to do — and Wattleseed turned out to be a really important thing for me.
When did you start thinking about going on tour, and why was it important to you — as a new group — to launch in this way?
I believe that all communities deserve to have great quality, entertaining, and thought-provoking live music, so regional touring was always part of the plan. This tour is called HOME, and it asks the question, ‘What does home mean to you?’. So naturally, I wanted to take it into people’s own places!
In the repertoire, we look at a number of different ideas of what home means, from the spiritual in Bach and Hildegard of Bingen, to the national in Scandinavian folk music, to our natural environments in works by Aussie composers Emily Sheppard and Matt Laing.
The past few years of online concerts have really driven home to me that there is nothing like live music, and even though wrangling a tour in these times is definitely a challenge, I know it’s going to be worth it!
This debut tour has hit three hitches along the way. How have you been coping through these postponements?
I think everyone in live performance has a postponement story! Putting on an event of any kind takes a huge amount of effort and enthusiasm, and postponing can put a bit of a dampener on that.
I think the hardest thing was the uncertainty. The last time I tried to put this tour on was in October last year, when we were in the middle of our sixth lockdown in Melbourne. To be honest, I felt paralysed trying to organise things for it, hoping that it might have the chance to go ahead, but having no idea.
I finally let that go when I realised that even if the tour could have gone to plan, it may not be the best thing for the project, particularly when it involved the premiere of a new piece by Matt Laing that we’d commissioned for it. The first performances are really crucial for a baby piece, and Matt’s work is seriously so cool that it would be a huge shame for it not to get the best start to life if audiences were nervous to go out.
When I let that go, things became easier, and I was able to work towards a more realistic timeframe.
As the cancellations went on, and now as Omicron has broken out, how has your attitude to live performance changed?
I think we’re all really learning to accept that COVID is here to stay, and with vaccinations and Omicron seeming to be less severe, we’re willing to venture back out to listen and to play.
I live in hope, but I also try to prepare for any situation — which included me panicking a week ago, and preparing several alternate programs for any possible iteration of the ensemble if one of us ends up in isolation for a concert!
The tour itself sounds worth the wait: let’s talk more about the new Australian composition you’ll premiere. Why did you want to commission new music as a way to set the tone for what sort of ensemble you would become?
I think it will be worth the wait! Matt Laing has written us a pretty remarkable new piece called From Home, and it describes the place he considers home: the Fleurieu Peninsula, south of Adelaide.
It has his usual combination of fascinating sounds with a sense of humour that is uniquely Matt’s: in this case, he instructs the viola and the cello to start tuning their C strings in the middle of the last movement. Gut strings require frequent tuning, because they’re so sensitive to changes in heat and humidity, and so early music concerts often involve a long period of string-tuning! I love that he’s thought about that and incorporated it into From Home in a way that really serves the music.
I particularly wanted to commission new music because we play on ancient instruments, and it’s really important to me to be playing music of our time and place despite that. I think baroque instruments provide something we’ve been craving in this time of separation and digitisation. They’re imperfect, intimate, and very personal. They have a speaking quality that modern metal strings just can’t quite get.
I think the combination of these instruments with new music really speaks to where we are now as a society, and I hope it provides that connection that we’re searching for.
I was reading in a statement that you’ve said From Home ‘reflects on the past, looks forward into the future, and captures the moment of choice we have now’. How would you describe this ‘choice’ of today, and how does this sentiment tie in with your values as an ensemble?
We have a choice now about how we shape our future and the future of our home: our land and seas and skies.
We’ve seen our world change so drastically due to COVID in the past two years, and we’ve all made enormous changes to our lives for the good of those we love; we’ve proved we can do it! We just have to apply that to a situation that is slower moving and much more complex, but just as real.
What words of encouragement would you say to other musicians who have experienced so many setbacks, just like you have?
It’s tough to keep going when life throws so many obstacles at you. Sometimes, it’s okay to stop and take care of yourself. If that means making more music, do that; if it means taking a break and finding another passion for a while, do that. If it means eating cake for breakfast, do that — for a bit! Music will be there, and it will feed you when you are hungry for it, and there will be people who are hungry to hear it.
Let’s use this time to remind ourselves why we chose this crazy path of music in the first place, whatever that might be.
Wattleseed Ensemble will tour regional Victoria with its program HOME from 19-29 March. For more information visit the website.
For more Australian stories in our COVID-19 careers series, click here.
Images supplied. Credit: Darren James.
