Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

A one-hour recital program building on The Cries of Melbourne – a newly-created collaborative work by local composers made up of street recordings from Melbourne and composed vocal cries.

Go into the City features poly-textual motets from medieval Europe juxtaposed with contemporary commentary, including political caricature from Tim Hansen’s satirical song cycle Howls from the House.

The history of composed “cries” stretches back to Clément Janequin’s Cris de Paris in the first half of the 16th century, and since then, Orlando Gibbons’ depiction of the street cries of London; in the 1970s Luciano Berio continued the tradition with his own London cries, originally written for the King’s Singers and reworked for the Swingle Singers. In this hour-long sequence (following their concert with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra), The Song Company dig down even earlier – to a Parisian strawberry-seller in the 13th-century Montpellier Codex – and layer the brand new city textures of The Cries of Melbourne with fragments of passion, parody, riot and ruin from Paris, Tournai, Canberra, and London.

Presented by Melbourne Recital Centre and The Song Company.

Program

Crowd-composed piece
The Cries of Melbourne

Anonymous
Missa Tournai / Ite missa est

Pauline Oliveros
Sound Patterns

The Catch Club
Joy in the Gates

Montpellier Codex
On parole de batre / A Paris soir et matin / Frese nouvele

Anthony Pitts
Lamentations 5

Adam de la Halle
Hareu (rondeau 3)

Tim Hansen
Songs from Howls in the House

Featured non-Australian music: Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Pitts, Adam de la Halle

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (03) 9699 3333

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer The Song Company