BY LILY BRYANT, SERIES CURATOR
Welcome to a brand new year of amazing Australian artists, and a brand new year of Passing the Mic.
I developed this series last year after noticing how the discourse around female and non-binary composers in Australia framed their work in terms of their gender, a constraint generally not placed upon their male counterparts. Each edition, I interview a composer and share some of their work, alongside work of their peers, as part of a themed playlist. Today, our theme is storytelling.
For many of us over the past two years, stories comprised a fairly large portion of our lockdown experience, be it through the consumption of television, movies, books, or music. Some of those stories, like those of Joe Exotic, or Daphne Bridgerton, or Player 456, united us on a global scale, perhaps because their worlds were so far removed from our own. When our own stories seemed to be on hold, we turned to the stories of others, either to escape our realities, or feel them with greater depth. It became a chief responsibility of the (underappreciated!) arts community to remind us of our humanity.
Now, as we shift to a new understanding of what this pandemic means for the directions of our lives, telling our stories is a way of reigniting a sense of community we’ve been deprived of for so long. This cultural need for storytelling through art has been answered by Sydney composer, writer, and poet Gabrielle Cadenhead in her upcoming concert series. This month’s playlist highlights the ability of her work, and the work of all Australian female and non-binary artists, to tell our most important stories.
Gabrielle, I found your piece A Paradox of Sea and Coal (included in our playlist) evocative and effective in its narrative. Tell me about its story and your process of crystallising stories into pieces of music.
Thank you! I’m still quite proud of that piece, and the way it weaves together free-flowing music with metred sections, ‘musical’ sound and spoken sound, to conjure the visual juxtaposition of beautiful beach and haunting coal ships that you find in Newcastle.
I wrote a poem specifically to be part of this piece of music, so the form of the poetry and of the music were designed to work together symbiotically.
My process of writing music almost always starts with a story or an image: marching for trans rights down Macquarie St, walking through a tunnel full of glow worms, finding ‘home’ in different places, hearing the experiences of people in indefinite offshore detention. The story is the gravitational pull that guides the rest of my process, and the question I am always asking myself when composing a new piece of music is, ‘Is this true to the story? Will the audience hear the story if I make this compositional choice?’.
As a writer and poet as well as composer, you have the capacity to express stories across a number of disciplines. How does this interdisciplinary approach inform your composition? Do you find your processes across art forms are similar or quite separate?
Storytelling is what drew me to each of these disciplines in the first place.
Stories have this ability to connect us to each other, as reader and writer; and as composer, performer, and audience. My skills as a writer and poet are useful to my music composition process as I think about the shape and structure of the work in terms of narrative, and how to communicate just enough of that narrative to audiences through a concise program note so their imaginations can run wild as they listen.
I am open to finding metaphors across both disciplines, as I craft sounds that will capture and represent images like I would with words in a poem.
My process when it comes to poetry often starts more intuitively than when I am composing music. I try to ignore my inner critic and write whatever comes into my mind, and then be more critical in the revising process. When I’m composing, I often start by finding ways to illustrate the story through processes, and then try to break those processes as the composition progresses to allow the humanness of it to seep through.
Increasingly, I am creating interdisciplinary works that combine my poetry and music; often it will start with a poem that then informs my musical process, or both are created together.
You and your colleague Madison Briggs have curated a very exciting two-part concert series that’s coming up soon!
Sound Stories is a series of two concerts coming up on 12 February and 25 March that we’ve been working towards for many months.
Madison and I are heading up the Konzertprojekt team for this project, which is all about storytelling through music. The program features seven new works that have been commissioned especially for Sound Stories, composed by members and friends of Konzertprojekt; as well as three more premieres, and some wonderful existing works by Australian composers.
Each artist has interpreted the theme of ‘storytelling’ in a different way; the program includes an exploration of grief, a representation of cultural research, and even audiovisual collaborations. Our line-up of talented performers is also incredible!
What inspired you to curate this particular concert series built on stories? Is it something you feel has the capacity to resonate with audiences now, in this new stage of the pandemic?
I find that when experimental music has a story behind it, audiences have an imaginative entry point into the sound. Rather than feeling alienated by noises they might not think are strictly ‘musical’, they are able to grasp the deeper meaning behind them. For example, they can hear how this atonal gesture might represent someone’s emotional journey, or how this found percussion conjures an atmosphere that transports us to a particular setting.
The amount of television shows we have watched and novels we have read over the past two years illustrates just how important fictional and cultural narratives are. They can be an escape, they can inspire us in our own lives, and they can allow us to name what is happening in our society and to wrestle with that.
Konzertprojekt focuses on promoting diverse artists as well as emerging artists. Do you think that gives your group a unique opportunity to tell particular stories?
The stories that most interest me are those that enable us to recognise the humanity in each other. Making sure those stories are told means intentionally including people who don’t fit your stereotypical mould for what a composer or classical performer is ‘supposed’ to look like.
So, part of our process at Konzertprojekt is to build connections with our fellow emerging artists and to share our platform with them, because what makes new music strong is having many different voices be part of these creative conversations.
Before we sign off, can you tell us one of your favourite Australian female or nonbinary artists, and one of your favourite things about being a composer?
So hard to choose! Am I allowed to say two? Bree Van Reyk and Amanda Cole are both incredible composers. Bree’s Light for the First Time is one of my favourite pieces, and I’m excited that we’ve been able to program it for Sound Stories Part 2.
One of my favourite things about being a composer is workshopping a new piece with an ensemble; hearing my music brought to life, and exchanging ideas about how to make the piece better.
Hear Gabrielle Cadenhead’s music at Sound Stories, a two-part concert series presented by Konzertprojekt in collaboration with St Stephen’s Uniting Church and the City of Sydney, this 12 February and 25 March. Learn more on the website and follow Konzertprojekt on Facebook.
Passing the mic // Playlist #3
Gabrielle Cadenhead – A Paradox of Sea and Coal (2019)
Gabrielle Cadenhead – Luminosa (2018)
Christine Pan – Kamikaze – Wind of the Divine (2018)
Katia Tiutiunnik – Night Journey for string quartet (2001)
Sophie van Dijk – La petite vie d’un papillon (2017)
Hilary Kleinig – Lux in Tenebris! In Tenebris Lux! (2014)
Natalie Nicolas – The Rose That Wept (2017)
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If you like, you can say thanks to Lily for volunteering her time for Australian arts journalism during COVID. No amount too much or little, and any amount appreciated 🙂
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Images supplied. Lily captured with flute by William Hall.
