BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Welcome to our series, What the Fact?!
Throughout 2018, we’re teaming up with talent at the Australian National Academy of Music to bring you informed answers to real questions and topics about your music career.
Ever wondered why you feel performance anxiety? What the deal is with tuning to 440Hz – or not? How to lead an orchestra? We’re here to tell you all about it.
In this interview, we chat with Lisa Illean. Lisa is a London-based Australian composer of “quiet shadows” and “stillness”. The same words could be described of her practice: working as a composer often requires lengthy periods of quietness and solitude.
Ahead of the performance of her work Land’s End, which will be presented by the ANAM Orchestra in Celebrating Brett Dean, Lisa talks us through her worklife. After all, with her experience writing music for the performers of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and BBC Proms Chamber Series, she’s bound to have a thing or two to say about balance and process.
Hacking the isolation of a life in music
Composition for you seems to be a solitary activity. How do you navigate such an internal world for lengthy periods of time?
There are definitely times when writing notated music means I have to be at a desk (or an instrument) on my own and in relative quietude for concentrated periods. The pieces are conceived as a distilled ‘world’ of sounds and sensations, so I like to absorb myself daily and cull often.
It’s essential for me to keep at the front of my mind the musicians who will be realising the piece — it connects sounds imagined in solitude to the very tangible and social realm of performance. If it’s possible to meet throughout the composition process, this can help negotiate some of the tensions between the conceptual side of making and the practical.
When I’m concentrating for long periods of time, the sensation of physical space helps me stay grounded. Being able to look into the distance — or walk in a large park — refreshes my perspective.
How long did it take you to find a routine in which you could work at your most productive without burnout?
Every week is still different with regards to routine. But for the last eight years or so, I’ve tried to make sure that there is some time every day to concentrate on writing, and some time set aside for listening and reading new things.
Your works have been described as “quiet shadows” and “stillness and quietude”. How do you find inspiration for your compositions? Is it through solitude itself?
In addition to external referents — paintings, photographs, patterns of tapestry in the natural world, perceptual phenomena — my work is compelled by a personal ‘reckoning’ with the medium of sound itself. The writing is guided by a close attention to sonority (at times using non-tempered tunings) and subtly unfolding harmonic forms.
Inspiration is found through close listening — in the weighing, discriminating, comprehending, and appreciating of sound.
How important is it for composers — or indeed any musicians working in solitary — to engage in active social lives?
That’s a balance that has to be struck based on individual temperament. At the moment, my husband — also a composer — and I both work from home and the house is often full of other people’s music when we’re not working. I value time with family and close friends too much to become reclusive, and I find others endlessly inspiring.
What advice would you give to young people embarking on a career in composition?
Enjoy listening to as much live music as possible. Work with friends who are musicians. Be curious — read widely and engage deeply with other artforms.
Listen to Lisa Illean’s Land’s End as part of Celebrating Brett Dean, 7.30pm Friday at the Melbourne Recital Centre.
READ NEXT: Piano accompaniment vs playing with orchestra with recent ANAM Concerto Competition winner Caleb Wong.
We’re partnering with ANAM to hook up with some of the strongest talent in the world in our new educational series! Check back in soon for our next What the Fact?! with professionals in the music industry (or as Douglas might simply put it: in music!).
