Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

These wild flowers, these rank weeds pushing up in the interstices of the machine, grow in importance and then overflow until they give the sections into which they have wormed their way like parasites an entirely unexpected coloration. (Gérard Grisey, 1986)

For Kupka’s Piano’s first concert in our 2014 series ‘Il faut être’ at JWCoCA we join forces with Sydney’s formidable Ensemble Offspring to present an exploration of the mechanic and the organic in music. As a combined super-ensemble, as distinct groups and as soloists we explore the free and the necessary, the lyrical and the rhythmic, the structured and the unstructured – musical time and the time of the ticking clock.

On the one hand Gerard Grisey’s monumental Talea, the organic ‘rank weeds’ emerge from a machine-like process, distorting it and transforming it. On the other, in Workers’ Union by Andriessen, the industrial rhythms – the turning of the cogs of the modern factory – are operated by the physical bodies of the workers, whose unity in struggle forms them into a single organism.

The undulating lines of Jane Stanley’s Helix Reflection call forth acoustic and psychoacoustic phenomena that seem to lead us into an alien ecosystem, while Matthew Shlomowitz’s Letter Piece 8 Sit Up Stand Down presents us with a musical moving robot built entirely on the alphabet.

Come along and hear these works along with a number of others, including a world premiere by Kupka’s composer Michael Mathieson-Sandars and Sydney based Damian Barbeler.

Michael Mathieson-Sandars // New Work // 2014**
Matthew Shlomowitz // Letter Piece 8 // 2013
Jukka Tiensuu // Asteletsa // 1999
Philippe Hurel // Loops // 2000*
Damian Barbeler // Deviations on White // 2014**
Gerard Grisey // Talea //1986
Jane Stanley // Helix Reflection // 2013
Louis Andriessen // Worker’s Union // 1975

* Australian premiere
** World premiere

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Featured non-Australian music: Jukka Tiensuu, Philippe Hurel, Gerard Grisey, Louis Andriessen

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (07) 3872 9000 or by email to info@judithwrightcentre.com

Featured Australian Works

	Deviations on White : solo vibraphone (2014) by Damian Barbeler — performed by Ensemble Offspring
	Helix reflection : for flute and Bb clarinet (2013) by Jane Stanley — performed by Ensemble Offspring
	Letter Piece No. 8 (Sit up Stand down) by Matthew Shlomowitz — performed by Ensemble Offspring

Featured artists

• New work by Michael Mathieson-Sandars
• Performer Kupka's Piano
• Performer Ensemble Offspring