BY CUTCOMMON
There’s an old adage in the world of music, and that’s to know the rules before you break them.
Composer Damien Ricketson is taking this approach into his work with early career talent in the 2023 Hatched Composer Intensive. Rather than locking young composers into the rigid rules of classical music, Damien is prioritising the artists’ voices and “self-agency” — fostering a space to pursue musical ideas that reflect the values and experiences of today.
Hatched is an Ensemble Offspring initiative that this year connects early career composers Isabella Rahme (NSW), Noemi Liba Friedman (VIC), Matthew Laing (VIC), Isabella Gerometta (QLD), and Jessica Lindsay Smith (VIC) with Australian and international composers — including Damien — for mentoring and workshopping. This week, they’re undergoing an intensive that will culminate in a showcase of their work, which you’re free to rock up to in Sydney. We chat with Damien about this educational program.
Damien, what do you most love about working with young or emerging composers?
I love the open-mindedness and exploratory inclination that often accompanies this period of musical coming-of-age. It is a creatively fertile time where the composer is negotiating their place in the world and how this may be reflected in sound.
I am most proud if I can help, in some small way, an emerging composer better listen to themselves and articulate what they already have to say. Working with new composers also has the personal benefit of often challenging my own habits and preconceptions, and helping keep my own mind fresh and receptive to new ideas.
You’re meeting up with some top young talent, sharing your important insights into the music industry as you mentor them through their work. What are some of the key topics or lessons that you generally like to cover as part of Hatched, and that you think are necessary for composers to be exploring from the beginning of their careers?
In developing an artistic practice, I try to promote self-agency in the way young musicians conceptualise, design, and present their music.
As an ex-Louis Andriessen student, I was encouraged not to feel too beholden to existing classical music structures — orchestras and the like — but rather mobilise and collaborate with my own generation to develop our own performance platforms and community of supporters. This is how Ensemble Offspring began.
It is interesting to come back to Ensemble Offspring, now a well-established organisation, in the context of Hatched to explore ways in which people of my generation can share knowledge and experience to help support a younger generation action their own music and mechanisms of dissemination.
What is something you think is magical about watching and working with these composers over the course of the week?
I suspect the magic will emerge from peer-to-peer learning. The week-long intensive lifts composition from a somewhat isolated endeavour to a social exchange in which ideas are shared and tested, problems raised and solutions explored. It is in these collective dialogues that future sounds, collaborations, and directions are seeded.
Music is human connection expressed through sound, and the intensive model of Hatched helps enable this person-to-person connection.
How do you preserve the composers’ voices while also guiding them towards certain musical decisions, such as those surrounding the unusual configuration of instruments in the program?
Preserving the composers’ voice, especially an emerging composer, can be a challenge in this context. Much of the overall soundworld is already written into the mixed chamber instruments and context at hand, not to mention the strong identity and big personalities already associated with Ensemble Offspring.
I encourage composers to consider the sum of their interests as a circle, and the identity of the ensemble as another circle, and look for points of overlap like a Venn diagram from where a mutually aligned voice and original work may emerge.
In reaching out to CutCommon, Ensemble Offspring described the week as being “designed to kickstart a successful career in music composition”. How would you define success in this discipline in Australia?
The definition of a successful career in music composition varies considerably depending on an individual’s personality and aspiration. Some may emphasise getting gigs and being able to make a living. Success here may relate to financial remuneration, but also the external affirmation of being in-demand – the sense of being valued by others.
Some may emphasise success more in terms of their impact on others – the capacity of their music to creatively respond to the problems of the world and affect change for good. For others, success may be more personal – the ability to actualise an authentic expression of self.
Perhaps multiple notions of these concepts of success will align to affirm one another, but they don’t have to. I tend to think of success as the ability to dream up an idea and have the capacity — internal skill and external recognition — to realise it, with the privilege of being heard — to engage an audience.
Who are some of the international mentors involved in Hatched, and what does that global perspective bring to the program?
Ensemble Offspring has a healthy global perspective and brings this outward-looking ethos and awareness to Hatched. The emerging composers have much more than just me to seek advice from. The ensemble facilitates connections with a diverse range of international artists that are specifically relevant to the individual composers and their interests.
What do you find are some of the most interesting things to observe when you bring the composers and performers together for rehearsal?
A new instrumental composition is a mere theoretical proposition until the performers come together for the first rehearsal. There is no composition lesson more valuable — and sometimes brutal. It is the moment an imaginary construct is materialised through the breath and touch of others, and sent reverberating around the room: a moment that lays transparent all the problems and potential of what the composer envisioned. Does what we hear with our ear align with what was previously only heard in the composer’s head? Does it fall short or exceed their expectations, or suggest unanticipated possibilities?
What can audiences expect when they listen to the showcase?
The Hatched showcase is a beautiful snapshot of an emerging Australian music. While the works collectively traverse familiar themes of time, space, physics, and cultural identity, each of the five composers — Isabella Rahme, Matthew Laing, Noemi Liba Friedman, Isabella Gerometta, and Jessica Lindsay Smith — have approached their themes in unique and individual ways.
From the humorous to the poetic, and the extreme to the serene, the concert will be a diverse and vibrant taste of the music of tomorrow.
Hear Ensemble Offspring’s 2023 Hatched Composer Showcase at 7.30pm November 11, The Neilson, ACO Pier 2/3.
Images supplied.
