Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Australian composers Cameron Lam and Connor d’Netto, and Americans Missy Mazzoli and Nico Muhly represent a generation of exciting young artists whose innovative musical idioms continue the tradition of universal storytelling through song. The works selected for this concert depict individuals surrounded yet alone, self-reflective yet longing for relatedness. This theme of the solitary figure in a crowded world reflects 21st century trends: the shrinking family unit and the exploration of new forms of personal union. In The World Within Me is Too Small, Missy Mazzoli’s protagonist, based on Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904), describes herself as “a lonely outsider among men”. The speakers in Mazzoli’s As Long as We Live and Self-portrait with Dishevelled Hair desperately seek connection with a beloved. In Nico Muhly’s So Many Things the singer describes an “observed potential lover, never approached and anxiously imagined”. Connor d’Netto’s rhythmically virtuosic Seven Percent Etudes are based upon equations by visionary mathematician and computer scientist Allan Turing, so tragically persecuted for being a gay man. The concert’s centrepiece, Fragments of Solitude by Cameron Lam, traces a pilgrim’s progress, paying tribute to a familiar art song trope: a lonesome journey undertaken in the quest for spiritual fulfilment.

Featured non-Australian music: Three Etudes for Piano by Nico Muhly, Selected Songs by Missy Mazzoli

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by email to fineartsmusic-er@unimelb.edu.au

Featured artists

• Music of Cameron Lam
• Music of Connor D'Netto
• Performer Linda Barcan
• Performer Coady Green