Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

I find writing program notes hard. I'll sit in front of a blank .doc and stare, wondering what to write, how to most interestingly/usefully convey in words something about the music I've written. Often I just start journalling, jotting down how this piece came about, who commissioned it, how I'd been introduced to a certain poem or source of inspiration, where the title came from, etc., seeing if any of that might lead somewhere somewhat interesting. As I sat here today (two days before the premiere of this piece) I was again faced staring at that blank .doc, finding it difficult to get anything out. I then realised that that was what this poem was about to its poet.

A couple months back, Miranda Hill, director of- and bassist in Homophonic!, sent a list of poets for me to read up on and perhaps select a poem by for this commission. Alex Creece came highly recommended (Alex had in fact written and read a poem at Miranda's wedding) and I began to sift thought her delightful and curious poetry - poems about hands, the colour 'taupe', brutalism, bite marks and collections of teeth - all beguiling and beautiful. Looking through a list of works, the title "i ain't reading all that / i'm happy for you tho / or sorry that happened" immediately grabbed me; the phrase-turned-meme is from a DM screenshot from 2019 that since has become a general reaction to any block of text online, a catch-all copypasta. I clicked through and was faced with a formidable block of text, not a paragraph break in sight, that (viewed from my phone) seemed to scroll on forever. I began to read, lost my place, scrolled a little, a reference to the movie Chicken Run jumped out to me for some reason, picked up reading from there, continued to the end, back around to the start, back to Chicken Run. Each sentence seemed to fall from thin air, rarely connecting to the last, though occasionally a handful would coalesce on some theme, then suddenly veering somewhere else. It's sprawling, slightly/wonderfully unhinged, and dotted with surprisingly poignant moments amidst absurdity. Something about the poem felt so very alive to me, perhaps in a sort of overwhelming way.

Miranda made introductions between Alex and I, and we made plans to meet for coffee on the weekend. She told me of how she was going through a period of creative fatigue a couple years ago, finding it difficult to get anything out, to write. She set herself the task of writing a sentence a day, letting herself just write unburdened by purpose, meaning or context, freely assembling a strange exquisite corpse.