BY JASMINE MIDDLETON
With a new generation of young composers comes not only new musical ideas, but a fresh perspective on what it means to compose.
University of Western Australia Conservatorium of Music student Nate Wood – along with composers Ryan Burge (ECU), Olivia Davies (UWA), and Annika Moses (ECU) – will have the opportunity to develop a new work with the highly esteemed Ensemble Offspring in its Young and Emerging Composers Lab.
As a composition and violin performance student, Nate’s typical uni week can range from playing in the UWA Symphony Orchestra to participating in various ad hoc improv combos. His assortment of compositional elements is also eclectic; recent works include the use of synthesisers, polystyrene, tin whistles, and bicycles.
We chat to Nate about the upcoming collaboration with Ensemble Offspring, how to create your compositional sound, and what it’s like to compose in the current new music climate.
How would you describe your compositional voice?
I try and stay flexible and pursue whatever sounds and structures I am interested in at a given time. Lately, I’ve been interested in very sparse, quiet textures, and impulsive, gestural figuration that fit within that silence. This is the kind of approach I took to geoid, a piece for orchestra that was recently premiered with the UWA Symphony Orchestra.
More recently, four motes is pretty different to most of the other stuff I’ve been writing for the last year or two – [which was] being really loud, metrically precise and complex – and very procedural and machinic. Ultimately, though, I’ve always wanted to underscore everything I do with a playfulness; but that can easily be lost in a rigid concert-music tradition.
Tell us about the piece you’ll be workshopping in the Composers Lab.
four motes is fourth in a series of loosely connected pieces titled motes. It’s for piccolo, clarinet, vibraphone, and piano, and is exactly 10 minutes long. Each piece in this series is based on some more-or-less strict procedure, and the overall effect is pointillistic.
I’ve always had a passion for very repetitive minimalist music and wanted to explore this in relation to the rhythmic figuration of Nancarrow and Ligeti. The result is a piece which is very rhythmically complex, but harmonically quite static. Each part plays in a different metre and different tempo, but each bar takes the same amount of time for each player.
Working out the rhythm felt like a process of etching, or maybe carving – I had a big pattern laid out from which I spent a lot of time counting and removing notes to see what would remain. The piece has a lot of hidden structure, as if the listener is hearing something that’s been eroded by wind for a long time.
I guess, to draw attention to the rhythmic and timbral aspects of the listening experience, I decided to make the harmonic component very plain and unadorned. The first six minutes play with only F, the seventh minute briefly introduces 11 more pitches before quickly abandoning them for the remaining three minutes on D. That seventh minute borrows the exact same sequence of notes that I used in geoid.
What are you most looking forward to about working with Ensemble Offspring?
It’s a really great opportunity to work with such excellent professional performers! Ensemble Offspring has done a lot to promote new music around Australia, working with both established and emerging composers.
It should be interesting to see how it pans out over quite a tight workshop schedule; I’ve made a bit of a gamble with this piece and hopefully the effect I was going for in composition is able to be realised acoustically.
As well as studying composition at the UWA Conservatorium of Music with Chris Tonkin, you also study violin performance! How have you found juggling both, and has there ever been any overlap?
I was extremely lucky growing up in a rich musical environment, learning violin and playing in orchestras since I was about eight years old. Studying composition though, I felt like I wanted to return to violin performance with a new teacher to expand my practical knowledge. It’s been brilliant to have that opportunity to study with Shaun Lee-Chen, but it has been a bit of a balancing act. This semester, I have dialled back the violin to focus entirely on composition, but I’m currently writing a piece for Shaun that will hopefully be a part of my recital later in the year.
What do you believe the next generation of composers can bring to classical music?
I see a lot of promise and a very diverse field of works. There’s such a wealth of resources and access to information that composing becomes like a kind of mapping or searching. Composers don’t seem to be relying so much on old modernist conceits of revolutionising or advancing music, but are more and more content to simply create works and add them to the sea of musical artefacts we find ourselves in.
For me, I would like to see a more decisive abandonment of ‘classical’ music, which is this ‘holy’ Western tradition, and towards a more open musical culture that interfaces with and respects popular and world musics equitably.
Looking ahead, what’s next on your list of creative projects?
Currently, I’m working on a chamber opera of sorts for my Bachelor’s recital, which at some point I would like to expand upon with a full staging. My brother Jesse Wood is a puppet-maker and filmmaker who does work with Spare Parts Puppet Theatre, so we want to combine efforts to produce some publicly staged performances. I also have loose plans to attend the Darmstadt Summer Music Course for New Music next year, but that’s still up in the air.
Nate is taking part in the Young and Emerging Composers Lab, through which Ensemble Offspring in collaboration with Tura works with composers of the WA Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University and University of WA Conservatorium of Music to develop new works. The lab takes place this week (closed event), and the works will be performed at a free concert at 7pm September 13 at the Subiaco Arts Centre.
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