Looking forward to 2011!

After a summer of Shakespeare, in which I played Dogberry in a professional production of "Much Ado About Nothing" (including some really nice scenes with my daughter, Margaret, see one below!)

it's time to get 2011 organised from the point of view of being a composer and conductor!

Full details are on my website but here are a few highlights:

A plethora of conducting gigs with the Sydney Male Choir the first one of which is on 8th March.

Several world and Australian premieres. These include:

26th March. World premiere of my "Flying in Paradise" for 4 euphoniums and 2 tubas at the 2011 Tubamania International Festival in Bangkok, Thailand! The performance will feature Matt van Emmerick, international euphonium artist, Steve Rosse, principal tuba of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the E-Tan quartet. 

10th July, Syzergy Ensmble, to give Austraian premiere of "To The Ends of The Ocean" for flute, clarinet and piano, for The British Music Society of Victoria (existing as Lyrebird Music Society, Inc)  at Wyselaskie Auditorium, Uniting Church Centre for Theology and Ministry, 1 Morrison Close, Parkville, Vic.


3rd December, world premiere performance of "A Kiss Before The World's End", my concerto for Viola and Symphonic Wind Ensemble; Brett Deubner, vla and the Grainger Wind Symphony conducted by Roland Yeung.

So it's a good start to the new freelance life, and who knows what else will turn up? There's  some teaching to organise and other projects on the boil with some fantastic artists. Stayed tuned!!

A short message :)

A Merry Christmas to you all and a wonderful 2011!!!

A little taste of the new career :)

As of the end of January 2011, I will be deemed surplus to requirements at the University of Wollongong where they have, to put it bluntly, cut the composition program and offered Voluntary separation to three world-class creative composers and researchers. In the meantime, while acknowledging that the Faculty has too many governmental position, they have managed to restructure the Faculty with THE SAME NUMBER OF GOVERNMENTAL POSITIONS BUT WITH DIFFERENT NAMES!!! All of the senior executive staff have received new job titles and, one assumes, carry on as normal. Meanwhile I can hear the scraping of deck chairs around the games deck on the Titanic.

One of the ways to put such unpleasantness behind me, is to think on the fantastic opportunities and adventures that await outside the whinnet-ridden walls of academia.

Here is one such adventure. In August I began my tenure as Musical Director of the Sydney Male Choir - one of the oldest choirs in Australia. My first performance with them was on 12th September 2010 at the Sydney Town Hall. Here is an excerpt from the DVD of that concert.

Enjoy!!!

A lovely premiere!

The Sutherland Shire Choral Society, conducted by Melissa Kenny, premiered Laura's and my "4 Christmas Carols" today at 2:30 pm in St Patrick's Catholic Church, Sutherland. They did a really nice job with some very difficult music. The final one, in particular has some real rhythmic challenges for the singers, as well as setting the bar pretty high when it comes to getting the right balance between soloist and choir. All in all, it was a very satisfying performance, as the choir's diction was very good, and the silvery voice of soloist Judy Rough was delightful to listen to as the "difficult child" of the last carol.

The piece has been performed in bits at other times by the Illawarra Choral Society, although the final carol has never been performed. Thus, this counts as a world premiere of the collection. It was great to sit next to Laura and think, "This is really what we both wanted from these carols." The singers were very gracious and fulsome in their praise of both the words and the music, with some even saying that they'd like to perform more of my music. They may have been just being polite, but it's still nice to hear all the same!

That's the last premiere scheduled for this year. 2010 began with a new work for flute and organ played in the "Organs of the Goldfields" by Jean Penny and Andrew Blackburn in January, and, after several more pieces have been premiered in Taiwan, the USA, Melbourne and Sydney, it finishes with this one close to home. In all, six new works got airings this year - a record for me.

And there's more to come in 2011!

A great premiere!

On Wednesday 27th, my string orchestra piece, I Saw My Lady Weep was premiered in Melbourne by the Southern Cross Philharmonia. Conductor Gerald Gentry is a champion of Australian music and it's amazing to have a conductor who has such breadth on knowledge and musicianship interpreting your piece for a first performance. This is a conductor who worRalph Vaughan Williams, Roberto Gerard, Elizabeth Lutyens, Sir Arthur Bliss, Samuel Barber, John Ireland, Andrzej Panufnik, Percy Grainger  and Paul Hindemith The young players of the orchestra have a superb sound and are technically very good. It's a great pity this is not more than an "occasional" ensemble, as Gerald would be able to build a superb sound and ensemble sense form such great talent.

My piece, which was originally a string quartet written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra String Quartet at the 1995 Hoy Composers' Course, run by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, is based on the opening notes from John Dowland's song of the same name found in his Second Booke of Songs or Ayres (1600), which I first sang when I was about 15 or 16 in a concert, in full Elizabethan costume! I had been searching for a way into the work - an emotional entry key if you like - while under the pressure of having to try to compose the piece in less than a week. After three failed attempts to start the piece from a purely technical, sonic point of view, I finally found what I was looking for when, unbidden, a memory of the first time I saw my wife, Laura, cry, same to mind. 

The piece just flowed like tears (another Dowland reference for those of you who are counting) and the piece was completed in a real heat of industry. It's ten minutes long and took only five days using pencil and paper! It was so long that it caused Max to question whether or not I'd written it beforehand or not. However, there were plenty of witnesses to the contrary, so the piece went ahead. Afterwards, the players suggest that it would make a good string orchestra piece and, after 14 years of waiting (I converted it to a piece for String Orchestra in 1996) Gerald and the SCPO proved them right.

What was deeply satisfying to me about this work is that the complex counterpoint and deep emotion work very well together. It is a big wall of sound for a lot of the time, balanced by some very delicate and tiny sounds. Juxtaposition rules supreme, as it did for a lot of my music from the 1990's, and it still seems to hold up, 14 years after the event!

My deepest thanks to the Southern Cross Philhramonia and, most especially, Gerald Gentry for, as he says, championing Australia music!

An update on an exciting project

Last month, though it seems much further back, I was part of the creative team for a new project headed by lighting desigder extraordinaire Toby Knyvett. Briefly, along with two other composers, four dancers and come computers, cameras and interactive software, we created an event called Feedback You can read all about it by clicking the link above, which will take you to the documentation. There will be excerpts up on my website eventually too.

This is a very exciting and worthwhile project that seems to have garnered a lot of interest. The Festival circuit awaits, I think, as well as the installation circuit. We have some bugs to iron out as well as some over-arching structural ideas to develop, but this is one of the most interesting projects I've been involved with for some time. Keep a lookout for it as a Festival near you :)

A week in Tasmania

I think I've finally settled down enough to write about the superb week we have just spent in Hobart. I was Composer-in-Residence at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music last week, and Laura had a teaching gig at the Tasmanian Writers' Centre. Margaret brought her homework and, apart from a few hours a day spent doing maths and German, the city lay at her feet!

Hobart left a deep impression on all of us. Apart from its beauty and the happiness all around (people seemed really content to live there!) there was a delightful mix of sophistication and a "small town" feel. It was like stepping into a Cornish fishing village which just happened to have all the amenities of a capital city.

This included the University of Tasmania and its Conservatorium of Music. They were my generous and friendly hosts, providing us with a lovely, rustic cottage built around 1850 (and still going strong except for the night when the clothes dryer fell off the wall) and a steady, but not overwhelming, stream of student composers who are always exciting and challenging.

Apart from the one-to-one lessons (a bit of a novelty for me at the moment) I gave a two-hour seminar on my music, and Laura and I presented a one-hour seminar on the subject of collaboration - particularly ours.

On the Saturday night, the 9th October, pianist Vanessa Sharman capped the week off for me by premiering my "With Open Arms" for solo piano. Her intensity and musicianship were a blessing to a piece that has so much space, silence, reverberation and tension. The moment at the end where she crossed arms was a huge relief of tension both musically and "theatrically" - a dramatic moment she completely understood. In fact, she understood the work superbly all the way through. I could not have asked for a better reading of this work. I feel very blessed.

Sunday was a day to savour as, on Margaret's suggestion, we went to the Choral Eucharist at St David's Cathedral. An added bonus to the superb music was the presence of an old friend and colleague, Jane Edwards, who consummately performed the Mozart "Laudate Dominum". Afterwards, it was a great joy to have lunch with her, her husband Drew and little girl, Grace.

Add to all of this two perfect journeys to and from Wollongong and Hobart and we look back on this time as very special.

My thanks to Maria Grenfell, Don Kay and Kevin Purcell for making it all possible, Peter Lynch for organising the mechanics of it all, Sarah Miller for singing the papers and let me go and Stephen Ingham, who covered my classes while I was away.

And thanks to Laura and Margaret for coming with me :) It made all the difference that we could share this together.