BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Prepare to hear music you’ve never heard before.
The Tilde New Music Festival showcases just that – new and rarely heard music from performers across Australia and the United States. The collaborative event will bring mediums together from dance to visual art, sound to computer.
In its third year, the festival features works from composers such as Houston Dunleavy, Katia Tiutiunnik, Chris Dench, Michael Smetanin. Co-founder Vincent Giles will have his own works showcased at the festival – expect improvisation with violin and laptop. Vincent tells us everything we need to know about Tilde, and why it’s an event no music enthusiast should miss.
When did you start the Tilde New Music Festival?
Alice and I started planning the festival in 2012, and had really, really big dreams. At the beginning of 2013 we both travelled to the Impuls Academy and Festival for Contemporary Music in Graz, Austria, to get an idea of what the European new music festivals were like. Came back, sat on it for a while, then Testing Grounds started up and we jumped on the opportunity to start the festival with the 2014 Tilde New Music Mini-Festival, which ran for about half a day. So January 2014 was the first one, and we only started organising it about six weeks prior! That was a lot of fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, but it was worth it.
Why did you feel there was a need for a festival such as this, showcasing new and experimental works?
At the time there was little in Victoria that really catered to new music in a focussed way; we were dissatisfied with the Metropolis Festival, but recognise that it has a place. We also think it very important to get practitioners into one space in a less formal setting. So the impulse was multi-faceted – on one hand, we wanted a single event that showed the diversity of experimental musical practice in Australia. On the second hand, we wanted to dissolve some of the potentially alienating performance practices surrounding art music, such as the inappropriateness of clapping between movements and the ‘closed door’ feeling that sometimes goes with these concerts. And, on the third hand, we wanted to create a physical space where interaction between concertgoers and practitioners was fluid and without the potential for ‘us and them’ distance. It was a fantastic stroke of coincidence that around the time we were initially thinking of the festival, David Chisholm got the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music up and running and, with that, we really shifted our focus to being much more grass-roots and about the less discovered amongst us.
How have you found audiences receive new works? Do you think the same audiences attend your concerts as do ‘classical’ music concerts?
Generally, I think audiences receive new works about as well as they receive non-new works. Not all the works are good, not everybody likes everything. That’s just the way of things. What I do think, however, is that people do not know that they like new works, and often the aforementioned performance customs can be a block in experiencing them. In particular, I am talking about the romantic tradition of program notes and composer idolisation, where people might feel that because they don’t like a piece means that they don’t get it, and that they are somehow missing something – which may or may not be the case, but it’s perfectly okay to just not like or connect with a piece. That’s talking about the individual of course, but collectively I think that there is huge portion of the population that would like this music (though not necessarily all of it) if they knew it existed.
There is definitely some overlap between traditional ‘classical’ concerts and those who attend new/experimental music concerts, but of course, like any tradition there are those who dismiss advancement in favour of conservation of the past.
What opportunities does Tilde provide to new composers?
This year we are running for the first time our academy, which we have wanted to do for years, in partnership with the Arts Centre Melbourne. In that, we are offering a computer music stream (alongside the performance stream) working principally with electro-acoustic musical practice over five days to realise a work for installation.
At the festival, we provide a space/platform/avenue for the presentation of new works, so it’s really open to whatever people want to propose. The proposals are then assessed via a panel and we try to fit as many that fit the scope of the festival as possible, within the technical, logistic, and aesthetic restrictions that we have.
How did you go about starting (and now running) the festival?
Honestly, we just sort of did it. Money? Pfft! Time? Pfft. We realised an opportunity (Testing Grounds) and just went for it, asking friends and non-friends if they would play. The second year was much more structured and that’s when we started putting calls out for works to be presented.
The running of the festival we are currently doing completely unpaid, which takes an extraordinary amount of time, and we’re still running on a shoe-string budget of what we can afford to chip in plus the good will of artists. That’s something we are actively seeking to change, but we’re looking for avenues (such as partnering with Arts Centre Melbourne for the Academy, and the Australian Institute of Music and Testing Grounds for the festival) other than public funding so as to keep funding incoming rather than having to re-apply over and over, and also in keeping with the grass-roots nature of the festival. This has yet to be worked out, but it’s part of our plan for growing the festival.
We currently have a team of four: myself and Alice Bennett are the artistic directors, and Alice does more of the day-to-day work than I do, which takes a couple of days a week for about six months leading up to the festival. We also have Kevan Atkins, our production coordinator who this year is taking care of all the sound/technical setup which I was doing last year, and we have Nat Grant who is looking after volunteers and our food supply for the Saturday.
We’re extremely proud of the festival, particularly achieving what we have with little money. We are very keen to grow the festival even more (though seven days including the academy is pretty huge) and look at the funding issues and how to overcome those. But we really think that Tilde inhabits a crucial space in Melbourne (and Australia’s) cultural landscape, complimenting BIFEM, and Liquid Architecture.
The Tilde New Music Festival starts tomorrow and runs until January 24 in Melbourne. For a full line-up visit www.tilde.net.au.
Heard/Unheard:Flux. Vincent Giles, 2013. Recording, 60 minute duration split into 10 minute segments. Originally a four-track installation at a festival while Giles was composer in residence.[purchase_link id=”2801″ style=”button” color=”red” text=”Add to Cart”]
IMPULSE. Vincent Giles, 2013. Recording. An electro-acoustic work.[purchase_link id=”2806″ style=”button” color=”red” text=”Add to Cart”]
Images supplied.
