Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

Ghost Ships is a song cycle for contralto (or mezzo-soprano) and piano trio featuring extended techniques and optional amplification. The work playfully reshapes seafaring songs to explore themes of Australian migration and postcolonialism. The composer, Eve Klein, recounts:

"I grew up on Sydney's Northern Beaches-an expanse of light cadmium yellow sand looking out to an endless ocean. We would catch fish by the sewage processing plant at Clontaff, and go crabbing underneath the deck of the Manly Swim Club, racing the incoming tide to get off the rocks safely.

Scary stories of the sea were ever-present in schoolyard whispers and the ocean was also painted as a dangerous place where ships were lost, people drowned and little children eaten by monsters from the deep. This was made more real by my family history.

In 1949, my mother arrived in Australia from Malta at four years old, an overwhelming journey undertaken following tragedy: the loss of six children and their home in World War II bombings. My grandfather Karmenu was a frogman in the Royal Navy, removing landmines from ships in the Mediterranean Sea during the Second World War. After surviving this perilous work he arrived to find his home devastated, and the need to rebuild his family which was only held together in his absence by the will of my grandmother Josephine.

My father would take me fishing late into the night and tell stories of his childhood friend who was mauled to death in a shark attack on a local beach when he was twelve, a beach I grew up playing on. The sea loomed large in my childhood imaginings, and the (sometimes) pleasurable horrors of our family stories intermingled with British folk songs and Disney pirate adventures to form vivid vignettes of the sea twisted through the lens of European Colonialism and Australian migrant experiences. Ghost Ships captures these vignettes, using the lens of seafaring songs to tease out the sense of unearthly diaspora I felt growing up as a second-generation Maltese Australian on Sydney's Northern Beaches".

Work Details

Year: 2024

Instrumentation: Contralto or mezzo-soprano, piano trio (with players using additional mallets, picks, chains, stompbox, shaker, tambourine and two EBows).

Duration: 30 min.

Contents note: I. Siren’s Lament -- II. Devils’ Dram -- III. Nanna Josephine’s Journey -- IV. Shark Attack! -- V. Lady Badger’s Piratical Reel -- VI. Remembering Charlotte.

Dedication note: Dedicated to all women who've made arduous journeys, transgressed repressive social boundaries, or been unfairly maligned.

Commission note: Commissioned by Muses Trio.