BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
The composers of SPIRAL aren’t going to wait around for opportunities to have their original music performed. These artists make the opportunities for themselves.
Not only that, but the emerging composer-performers of SPIRAL bring fellow artists along for the ride as they commission new Australian music, too.
Seven Sydney Conservatorium of Music students founded SPIRAL in 2016. And after hitting up Vivid Sydney and Backstage Music (among other initiatives in the time since), the group is about to embark on a concert tour including stops in Brisbane, Toowomba, and Sydney. They’ll premiere Rory Knott’s The Lyre (Rory plays electric bass in the group), and perform Angus Davison’s Odd Logic, which they commissioned last year, along with works by Oscar Smith (pianist), Sarah Elise Thompson (pianist), and composer Joe Lisk.
We wanted to hear what it’s like to be part of a group when you’re a musician and you write the music. So we had a chat with three members of SPIRAL: Sarah, Oscar, and guitarist Josh Winestock.
Tell us about your role in SPIRAL. What do you get out of performing music with other composers? It’s somewhat rare for a collective of composers to band together in the ways you have for live concerts!
SARAH: Being a part of SPIRAL is a dream scenario for a young composer, as you are in an environment where you get to compose pieces specifically for your friends who not only learn the music, but are also fully engaged in the development of the piece, and help shape your work. In return, you also get to help other SPIRAL members with their pieces, and get to know the repertoire in an extremely personal way.
There’s often a challenge when you’re first starting out as a composer to find your ‘compositional voice’; and by having the opportunity to work with trusted peers, I feel more confident in my own writing and the chance as a group to be able to discover new aspects of all of our compositional voices.
OSCAR: For me as a composer, it gives me the opportunity to keep my performing skills up as a pianist. It’s a shame that sometimes, composers earn the reputation as washed-up performers – and so it’s great to work against that stereotype, especially when the two sides of the coin are very much inseparable.
Whilst we’re not absolute virtuosos, what we bring to the table is the kind of analytical approach that composers develop in institutions while performers practice technical exercises. This puts us in a unique position to see compositional intent, and interpret accordingly. Also, within the institution, it’s not easy for composers to get the time to hone chamber music performance skills, so SPIRAL allows us to do that.
JOSH: We get so much out of it! At the most basic level, it means not only do we get to have our music regularly performed by a committed ensemble, but we also have a fantastic environment to float ideas and workshop our music in stages, which obviously has so many benefits. Then beyond that, I think as a composer there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gained from playing your own music: there’s a little spice the performer has to bring to every instrumental piece that the composer can’t provide, and it’s been great to experience contributing that myself, alongside the invaluable other members of SPIRAL.
Besides that, it feels like there’s a lot of integrity in just being able to deliver your piece all the way from the blank manuscript to the stage, rather than the sometimes frustrating feeling of musical infirmity from being unable to realise your own music yourself.
When Sarah reached out to CutCommon about SPIRAL, she had touched on “the importance of playing live as a young act”. How do you feel live performance opportunities benefit you as a composer in this stage of your career?
O: For one, it affords us a facility by which we can have our music workshopped and performed. The workshop process cannot be understated within SPIRAL: we’ve been able to bring totally incomplete sketches to the ensemble and receive critical feedback. Additionally, once a score is complete, we’ve allowed very generous times to workshop and reconsider or experiment, where an ensemble of performers might just have a few run-throughs with minimal opportunity for change. We also learn compassion for the hard yards that performers go through to perform our works by doing it ourselves.
S: One of the most important and rewarding parts of being in SPIRAL is creating a live show, where we get to bring to life the sounds and sketches we’ve been creating. We get the opportunity to follow a work from its inception all the way to the live performance; and to share our music with an audience is inspiring.
I think it’s so valuable to get out there and start playing your own pieces, as your audience is the sounding board for the music. How they respond to your music can affect how you interpret your piece, and maybe you’ll discover elements of the music that you may not have considered previously. We love to play for our Sydney audiences, and bringing something unique and special every concert.I’m really looking forward to taking SPIRAL on the road in April!
J: I think that community is fundamental to the ecosystem of ‘new music’ – ‘contemporary classical’, ‘modern’, whatever you want to call it: ‘our’ music. And that’s why it’s so rooted in live performance. It’s a musical environment of esoteric expression; a music that often eschews immediate gratification and asks its listeners to engage actively in listening and interpretation. For such music, it’s perfectly reasonable to want someone to talk to about it afterwards!
Framing new music as a special event in a performance, in the context of a program and presented by a particular ensemble, brings out all its strengths. I think that’s why so many composers orient themselves around live music. It’s about asking an audience to come and engage personally with an idea, a feeling, something idiosyncratic that you’re offering to them.
SPIRAL is not only filled with composers like yourselves, but you even commission new music – challenging a competitive culture. Why do you value collaboration with others practising your own artform?
S: It is a real privilege in SPIRAL to have the chance to provide opportunities to other upcoming composers whose music we love! All of us, being composers ourselves, know of the pressures of trying to get someone to listen to our music and put ourselves out there.
With this group, we approach new pieces extremely intimately by being really hands-on with the collaborative process, and we work with composers the entire time to get the best outcome they want. We look for artists who are doing something outside of our comfort zone, and will push us in different genres, and styles.
Getting to work with upcoming composer Angus Davison on his piece Odd Logic pushed us as a group, and forced us to work in sectionals and requires really precise attention to detail with every note. We loved having him come to our rehearsals and help direct the piece, sometimes even jumping in and playing the piece with us!
Another artist we enjoyed working with was Joseph Lisk – jazz/experimental trumpeter and composer. He wrote for us a piece called Hey Let’s Go to Woolies, which is extremely short and is notated completely differently to anything we’ve ever played! It’s a really dynamic, energetic work and we love playing it!
O: We sought out our close friend Angus Davison as a way to stretch ourselves as performers. Angus’s writing is idiomatic but not necessarily easy! His score Odd Logic, which we commissioned in 2018, was proportioned using the Fibonacci series. This has led to lots of interesting and unexpected quirks in the music, which we’ve really enjoyed playing. Meanwhile it is very much a chamber music work, requiring us to hone ensemble skills – for example, counting, moving together, cueing with body language – in a way that we haven’t done so much before with other music we have performed.
Additionally, Joe Lisk’s jazz background has put us in yet another totally unique position with a completely unconventional score called Hey Let’s Go to Woolies, and yet it has been one of the best pieces ever written for SPIRAL. Whilst it gave us a lot of freedom to interpret, it’s also asked us to be creative to make it hold together without Fibonacci proportions governing every change.
J: Being a composer has never seemed terribly competitive to me, or at least no more so than any other creative endeavour for insecure people. The idea is actually terrifying; I think that if I felt like it was competitive, I’d have to stop doing it! I don’t think creativity is essentially competitive, though humans are. But it’s the process of getting commissions, applying to competitions, and obtaining the all-important funding that drives people into competition. You’re competing for ‘opportunities’, which are limited and scarce. And I think with SPIRAL, we’re trying to create opportunity, rather than needing to consume it.
More specifically, we commissioned the particular external composers that we’ve worked with largely because we wanted to stretch ourselves as performers. Of course, we admired each of their work, but we also saw that they would make us express ourselves differently. As a guitarist, I hadn’t played a lot of new music before SPIRAL, and a lot of the music we’ve done has pushed me to play completely differently. Our piece by Angus Davison has even forced me to develop my conducting skills, which I’ve grown to quite enjoy.
That all said, I should say that we’re not searching for too many new composers just yet. We are certainly looking forward to a future of collaboration, but currently I think our focus is more on cooking what we already have.
See SPIRAL in Sydney (29 March), Toowoomba (12 April), and Brisbane (13 April). SPIRAL is Johannes MacDonald (flute/tenor saxophone), Josephine Macken (flute), Oscar Smith (piano/keyboard), Sarah Elise Thompson (keyboard), Josh Winestock (electric guitar), Rory Knott (electric bass), Will Hansen (double bass).
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