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Work Overview
'What if Beauty stood up to the Beast, the Princess never tried to sleep on the pea (and wouldn't have noticed it if she had) and the Swan Maiden took her revenge on the hunter who kidnapped her?'
These excellent questions have been posed by Australian author and illustrator Erin-Claire Barrow in her collection of fairy tale retellings, The Adventurous Princess and other feminist fairy tales. In receiving the Brisbane Girls Grammar School International Women's Day commission for 2025, I was really excited to revisit Erin-Claire's words as the inspiration for my new piece for the chamber singers, The Swan Maiden. I first created new work based on The Adventurous Princess collection in 2019, composing a piece for Young Adelaide Voices called Mirror mirror, which is based on Erin-Claire's retelling of Snow White in which the mirror is the clear villain - because why does one voice have the right to decide who is the fairest of them all?!
In October 2024 I was lucky enough to coordinate a lunchtime workshop with BGGS during a short trip from Adelaide to Brisbane. We shared Erin-Claire's version of the Swan Maiden story and did some testing of setting particular sentences to music, based on natural speech rhythms. This forms the basis of the chant-like sections of the new piece, which are interspersed with spoken words from our narrator(s). Some of the key moments in the story were also identified during our workshops, and even distilled down to key words - fierce, wild, strong... fly away! - which you'll hear in the music. I'm so excited for you to experience this story being sung!
Work Details
Year: 2025
Instrumentation: SSAA choir, piano, cello.
Duration: 6 min.
Commission note: Commissioned by Brisbane Girls Grammar School
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