BY TAMARA KOHLER
Kaylie and Tamara from Rubiks take on the 48th International Summer Course for New Music, Darmstadt. You can see Rubiks present songbirdsongs in Melbourne later this month.
A question commonly asked amongst new music circles: “have you been to Darmstadt?”. July 29 saw our arrival into a town we had long fantasised about. After a quick flight down from Berlin, and an exhilarating/terrifying ride on the autobahn, it was an afternoon of exploring the town, bumping into familiar faces, meeting some new ones, kicking those last remnants of jet lag and battling coordination issues associated with riding a bike for the first time since childhood.
The festival in Darmstadt really was the dreamland we had imagined. Each day began with plotting our moves amongst the myriad of activities, concerts, lectures and presentations available. We eventually learnt to keep our cool joining Brian Ferneyhough or Rebecca Saunders in the coffee line, or casually passing Beat Furrer in the hallway. The lovely thing was that it was easy to miss these established legends as they blended in with fellow festival-goers, camouflaged with the same excitement and beady-eyed curiosity!
Any spare moments between attending concerts and lectures were spent in rehearsals and development sessions. As the festival is well known for bringing together the world’s most established and current specialists, we found ourselves overwhelmed with choices between inspiring activities and events.
An unexpected theme for me at the festival became working with preparations to my flutes, including cups, balloons, paper cones, whistles and aluminium foil. Over three intensive days, I worked with composers Mu-Xuan Lin (Los Angeles) and Luciano Azzigotti (Buenos Aires) to develop and perform two new solo flute works, exploring additional attachments to the alto flute. I also workshopped and performed Swedish-German composer Ansgar Beste’s wind quintet Masquerade Obscure for prepared woodwind mouthpieces.
Meanwhile, over in the percussion building, Kaylie was busy working with George Apherghis, memorising and staging excerpts from his score Zig Bang, workshopping and preparing a new percussion work by Carolyn Chen and rehearsing large-scale percussion piece Cloud Polyphonies by James Woods.
The days were long, inspiring, exhausting, and at times challenging, but ultimately incredibly fulfilling. Whenever possible, we would pinch a sneaky half-hour for ourselves, ducking into town for a secret coffee to debrief on our personal discoveries, newly encountered composers and concepts, and to expel our over bubbling ideas for the future!
Perhaps one of our favourite takeaways from the festival was the initiation of a movement called GRID (Gender Relations in Darmstadt). After a fairly confronting panel chaired by composer Ashley Fure discussing the under-representation of females at the festival over the past years, and indeed amongst the arts profession, members of the festival met daily to brainstorm action against these issues. Soon a fully-fledged movement was alive; bikes were being flyer bombed, festivalgoers fashioned a GRID sticker on their shirts, forums were open for anyone to share their discrimination experiences, and concerts were being planned in the name of GRID! Read more about the movement.
The other festival ‘light bulb’ moment for us was a fascinating lecture by composers Steven Kazuo Takasugi and Jennifer Walshe (easily, our fan-girl crush of the festival) on The New Discipline. This was an inspiring lecture on the catalysts and future of music performance, and became a reference point for us in conversation almost every day following!
The final day of performances arrived, funnily enough the only day that Kaylie and Tamara performed on the same program. In the Darmstadt Vocal Class Showcase, Kaylie performed Les sept crimes de l’amour by George Aphergis, and Tamara joined Australian mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean to perform L’artisanat furieux, of Boulez’s masterpiece Le marteau sans matîre.
…and just like that, August 15 had rolled around and it was time for me to head back to Berlin, and Kaylie to return to Australia. We left Darmstadt with fond memories of schnitzel and beer, and absolutely buzzing with inspiration and new information to process and share with the rest of the Rubiks gang back in Australia!
Kaylie would like to thank John and Rosemary MacLeod for their generous support of her trip through the Australian National Academy of Music Travelling Scholarship.
Join Rubiks for songbirdsongs on September 28 at 7pm. For more information, visit www.rubikscollective.com.
Photography via Tamara Kohler, Kaylie Melville and ©IMD/danielpufe.com
