BY CUTCOMMON
Ensemble Offspring is a champion of new music. But this group isn’t afraid to dig up some classics — especially if it’s the right time for a revival. This month, Australian composer Richard Meale’s composition Incredible Floridas will be performed; it’s been 50 years since the London premiere, and now you’ll experience it with immersive staging in Carriageworks.
But Meale’s composition doesn’t purely belong to the past: this event shows us how one piece of music can have flow-on effects, and influence the creation of art around it. Sydney composer Josephine Macken (pictured below) has been developing a new piece of music with Ensemble Offspring, which they say was partly inspired by Meale’s “brooding and complex musical language“. It’s called The imaginary line about which the body rotates, and it’ll receive its world premiere in Ensemble Offspring’s upcoming event.
Another world premiere at this concert comes from Augustin Braud, whose Hexis features cello and percussion. Augustin is an award-winning composer of chamber and symphonic music, and we wanted to chat with him and Josephine about their new works, which you’ll hear for the first time in Incredible Floridas.
So tell us all about your world premieres! When did you start writing the music and what gave you that first spark of an idea?
JOSEPHINE: I began writing with a sense of wanting to align musical tensions, sustaining the trajectories of materials along horizontal and vertical axes; consider the paintings of Agnes Martin or the tapestries of Eva Hesse. With time, this way of thinking around musical axes would come to direct both the structure and the staging of the work.
I’m thrilled to be developing this piece with Ensemble Offspring as we’ll be operating in a relatively new area of my practice and thus able to investigate how these newer aspects of my work settle in a chamber music context.
AUGUSTIN: I started writing the piece last summer, but the idea was already there since a few months and our first exchanges with [artistic director] Claire Edwardes, as well as some reflections with Charles Davidson whose generosity made the piece possible.
I wanted to focus on the physical matters — woods and metals — and the ways that I can make these coalesce.
Josephine, I understand Richard Meale’s composition inspired your own. Tell us a bit about how you connect with his work Incredible Floridas.
J: It’s become one of those special works that resurfaces in my imagination time and time again. There’s a clarity about it that makes every relisten more vibrant than the last.
What’s behind the titles of your works?
J: The title of my work The imaginary line about which the body rotates describes an axis around which to cultivate and orient musical objects.
A: Hexis refers to habits; to what can define one’s way of shaping day-to-day tasks but on a more metaphysical level; how thoughts are shaped by our educations, cultures, etc. In the midst of a period of time where I moved from a city to another and most of my daily life changed, I thought it’d interesting to write a meditative piece to reflect on all of these.
And what narrative or theme can we hear unfolding from these ideas?
J: This piece celebrates conceptualisations of sound and temporality through the analogy of the ‘musical line’. In performance, the musicians direct the paths of intangible lines by attuning to the ever-changing trajectories of musical activity across the ensemble in relation to their own instruments and bodies.
These imaginary lines intersect with tangible ones — lengths of cotton string attached to the bodies and instruments of the players, which materialise imaginary lines and activate sounds at a distance.
A (pictured below): You’ll be able to hear a gradual unfolding of gestures, resonances, that complete each other over time.
What have you enjoyed about working with Ensemble Offspring to have this music prepared for performance in the event Incredible Floridas?
J: I have a deep admiration for the attentive and inquisitive musicality of Ensemble Offspring’s musicians. There’s a shared curiosity and excitement around the development of new work, which really pushes the possibilities of the music and becomes invaluable to the formation of the piece.
A: Even if we worked from a continent to another, it was to have many written and virtual exchanges with Claire and [cellist] Blair Harris. They were very open to my suggestions and also gave me some. The work is truly shaped by their musical intelligence and the vital link we entertained as musicians.
As a composer of today, why do you reckon Meale’s music, such as Incredible Floridas, is still resonant some 50 years later?
J: On the one hand, I’d pin the resonance of Meale’s music on the vitality of his compositional voice and originality in sculpting dense timbral landscapes.
On the other, the question of why any piece continues to resonate is a challenging one, given that historically and persistently the factors affecting which works are allowed to resonate beyond their contexts are bound up in discrimination on the basis of class, race, gender, disability, and orientation.
The continued resonance of Meale’s work is absolutely worthy of celebration; it’s something I’ll always be grateful for as a composer and listener.
However, we mustn’t overlook the opportunity this question presents to seek out and celebrate the work of contemporaries whose music has been unjustly denied that same resonance.
What do you hope will become of your composition in 50 years?
J: My hope it that the piece will cultivate something resembling a life of its own, both in the capable hands of Ensemble Offspring and through the varied perspectives of other groups.
A: It’s difficult to project oneself, let alone a musical piece, in the very complex future that awaits us. Nevertheless, I hope musicians can find some pleasure — and some challenge! — in playing the piece; [and that they] and the listeners to get a small breath of suspended time.
Hear this new music at Ensemble Offspring’s event Incredible Floridas, 7.30pm June 23 and 24 at Carriageworks.
Images supplied. This interview has been lightly edited for consistency and length.
