Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: David Chisholm  

Composers Out and About

ABC Classic FM’s Lute Project website features audio and video of the new lute compositions premiered by Tommie Anderson during the 2008 Aurora Festival. Visitors to the site (www.abc.net.au/classic/lute/) can watch and listen to Anderson talk about and perform the new works: RunSten:and Varin said: by Michael Atherton, Baker’s Dozen by Elena Kats-Chernin, l’amour et la mort by Rosalind Page and Double Play by Damien Ricketson. The videos are also offered for download, and there is additional information available on the website about the composers and the works. These new compositions for solo lute were commissioned by ABC Classic FM in association with the Aurora Festival.

Jane Stanley will be attending the Tanglewood Music Center from June to August 2008 as one of the Center’s composition fellows. The fellowships have been available for emerging professional musicians since the 1940s, when Serge Koussevitzky – then music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra – established the Center as a place for young musicians to work with internationally renowned artists.

Ensemble Modern will perform Peter McNamara’s Landscape of diffracted colours (2005) as part of the 2008 ISCM World Music Days program in Lithuania. The work is scored for mixed ensemble and pre-recorded electronics and will be conducted by Peter Eötvös in the Lithuanian National Philharmonic Hall in Vilnius on 26 October 2008. For more information, see: (www.wmd2008.org)

The Inter-Arts Office of the Australia Council for the Arts has announced funding for inter-disciplinary art projects through its ArtLab initiative. One of the two successful projects is a collaboration of artists Rod Cooper, Robin Fox, Jon Rose, Jim Sosnin and Frieder Weis, titled The Transmission Project: Wheel, Water, Wind – a wireless data technology platform for designing human/machine interfaces.

Prizes and awards

Betty Beath has won the inaugural Pacific Opera Vocal Writing Prize for her song cycle Towards the Psalms (2004). The work was originally written for the Southern Cross Soloists, and the new version for voice and piano was premiered at the award ceremony in April. The texts for the work were drawn from the novel Fugitive Pieces by the Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Beath’s music has also recently been heard in Brisbane, where her string orchestra piece Adagio for strings, lament for Kosovo (1999) has been performed twice this year by the Camerata of St. John's, and also in Beijing, China, where it was included in a concert program during the International Congress on Women in Music.

David Chisholm has received a Green Room award for his score Brindabella, premiered in December by the BalletLab company. Chisholm’s future plans include a composer residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France early in 2009. Camargo Foundation is a multi-disciplinary study centre that offers residencies for artists and scholars.

Andrián Pertout has been awarded the 2008 Dorian Le Gallienne Composition Prize. Pertout is currently working on a commission for the University of Hong Kong Balinese Gamelan Gong Kebyar Orchestra. The work has been commissioned by Julian Burnside QC and is scheduled to be premiered in October at the University of Hong Kong, SAR, and consequently played on other campuses in Hong Kong. The work for soprano saxophone and gamelan will also be workshopped at the Sanggar Bona Alit in Blahbatuh, Gianyar Regency, Bali in June and July.

New Releases

Peter Rechniewski’s essay The Permanent Underground: Australian Contemporary Jazz
in the New Millennium is now available for purchase at the Australian Music Centre's shop (www.amcoz.com.au/musicsaleslib/about_shop.htm).

The book provokes discussion on the status of jazz in Australia and suggests strategies to raise its profile. ‘Why, when our jazz musicians are so prized overseas, jazz remains a permanent underground in Australia?’ Rechniewski asks. The author has been involved in jazz for thirty years and is one of the founders of the Sydney Improvised Music Association (SIMA) as well as its current president and artistic director. (See also: Roger Dean's extended article on Rechniewski's work.)

Music by Ann Carr-Boyd has recently been released on a number of CDs, most notably a 70th birthday CD titled The Harp in the Highlands that includes her works Museum Garden (a song cycle for soprano and piano), song cycle Brown Pansies, Suite for Flute and Piano as well as solo piano music. Her works also feature on a compilation CD of piano music by Australian women, titled Ragtime, Dreams and Visions, on a CD of piano music recorded by John Martin, the CD Flute Odyssey by flautist Emma Knott and pianist David Miller as well as the CD Mandolin Music released by Jade CDs.