BY ANGUS DAVISON
Be warned: this gets heavy.
Two Tasmanian composers Michael Mathieson-Sandars and Josh Coe are set to have their works performed this Saturday as part of the Composers’ Showcase gig at the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music. Michael has moved from interstate to undertake his Honours degree, while Josh is on exchange from America.
While they’re preparing for the gig, I ask them about their pieces for the concert, their musical goals, and their views on the role of new music today.
Prepare for some seriously deep thinking.
Michael Mathieson-Sandars
I describe myself as a modernist composer – though I’m still figuring out what that means today. I employ a detailed notational language (relative to the canon), and aim towards nuanced and granulated performances.
Composing is an activity that rewards having numerous broader pursuits, and my own compositional practice both determines and is determined by my relation to bigger things. The deeper I’ve dug into writing music, the more necessary it’s felt to engage with other art forms, their histories, and radical politics, as well as aesthetic theories and philosophical discourses. Many of these present ideas which make it hard to disentangle real-world political and artistic ideologies. This kind of creative production brings me closer to my social existence.
A degree itself is totally useless for all purposes other than getting further degrees, but I enjoy what formal study affords me. In the upcoming Composers’ Showcase, violinist Alethea Coombe will premiere a work I wrote collaboratively with her. It sounds very little like the description of my music above because it is partially improvised, and because it borrows stylistically from Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag, in whose music Alethea holds a keen interest.
Contemporary classical music has almost no influence on real-world events. But there’s something to be said for allowing and encouraging experimental art as a model of production. The creation of art is so often presented as a luxury, and for many, it is. Though some are allowed to create freely, others are left to the unrewarded toil and drudgery which the current economic organisation of our society requires. I think this is unfair, but advocate that it is the organisation that needs to be fundamentally changed in order for everyone to have some direct and creative role in the way society exists. There’s something special and powerful in this freer and more creative model of production and conservative critics are right to be fearful of what it represents.
Josh Coe
All my life I’ve wanted to be a creator. First, I wanted to be a visual artist, then an author. In grade 6, I picked up a trumpet and realised what I really wanted to create was music. Many of my compositions revolve around my Christian faith, and hymns, Gregorian chant, and biblical texts make regular appearances in my work. My recent music is rhythmically complex and atonal.
My piece for the Composers’ Showcase is a solo piano work called ‘Alaskan Symmetry’. Last summer, I spent time in Denali National Park in interior Alaska. The park is named after the largest mountain in North America, Mount McKinley, also called Denali. I was struck by the image of Denali reflected in Mirror Lake (an iconic destination along the park road) creating a symmetrical image. Each movement of the piece plays with the idea of symmetry in a different way. Additionally, each is based on a different birdsong from birds in the Denali region.
I think contemporary classical music is extremely powerful, and incredibly relevant. I believe the potential for emotional expression has reached its height in the post-modern period, in which any technique or sound is acceptable in composition. This creates limitless possibilities for expression, and therefore, more of the human experience can be communicated. In an age where there is a seemingly infinite capacity for both compassion and horror, contemporary classical music is necessary to preserve the beauty and complexity of our day.
The next step for me is graduate school. I would like to get my doctorate and teach composition at the university level, preferably internationally. I am passionate about teaching, love encouraging others to achieve their definition of success, and find joy in celebrating that success with them.
The Composers’ Showcase concert takes place at the UTAS Conservatorium of Music, 7.30pm October 26, tickets $10.
Images of Josh Coe (left) and Michael Mathieson-Sandars (credit Nick Morrissey) supplied.
