Author: feverpitchmagazine

By Sean Quinn

You can keep up to date with Sean’s composing adventures through his Facebook, Instagram, and website. Sean is the founder of chamber music ensemble Children of the Millennium, which focuses on performing works of the 20th and 21st Century. You can find out more from their Facebook page here, Instagram page here

The world is becoming one of a social hierarchy, which unfortunately has its bearing on and within the Arts sector of society. We are often complacent with how we categorise and label parts of that hierarchy, and can sometimes create a construct built off of popularity rather than necessarily alternative and innovative thinking. We are constantly debating about what the ‘norm’ is. But in the contemporary classical world, due to the diversity of compositional voices, there cannot be a consensus on what is ‘normal’, unless it is one’s own opinion.

I am drawn to the term ‘experimental’, which in most art-forms, is a vulgar term that is too often synonymous with ‘alternative’, ‘different’ and ‘inaccessible’, and can categorise a composer’s work as ‘obsolete’. Hence why many choose to abandon this term purely to describe their music as ‘contemporary’. I have personally adopted this due to the attacks I’ve received over my time for taking an ‘experimental’ approach to parts of my practice.

Whilst I advocate very much for the new and alternative, and have dabbled in the “uber-contemporary”, I am a creature of habit and tradition, and tend to feed off the balance in music that I desire in my own practice and in the practice of others. I see that ‘balance’ is the key to evening out the playing field; every musician should have a diverse practice/range of skills.

It’s not often that I associate myself with any particular style; sometimes I switch between tonal and atonal, partly contemporary and ultra-contemporary, and god forbid I even wander into ‘experimental’ territory occasionally. Many young composers and artists are likely to have a phase in their life that involves experimenting with new methods, styles and eventually compositional voices until they find one that is totally them. We as a community of artists have emerged from the past Renaissances of pivotal figures, which of course can be examples to us. But let it be said that discouraging a student from a particular art form due to it being ‘experimental’, ‘old-hat’ or ‘alternative’; this is why this sort of music and art will never thrive, due to its suppression and suffocation. Of course not everyone has to be a thorough advocate, but instead be respectful of what people engage with – it comes down to taste.

‘There is a place for everything, and everything in its place.’ Something my father has said to me constantly throughout my lifetime, and I believe fits the music world well. Composers, and artists in general, should not feel bound by society’s opinion solely, but instead push people to understand as best they can; and while doing so, respect that new music is not for everyone. Not all people are going to understand what we do, nor are they going to like all of it, but someone will, and when they do feel the satisfaction of being praised. Hold on to that praise, as infrequent as it may seem.

Without the need for clichés such as “follow your passion” and “do what makes you feel good”; engage with a broad variety of practices is my best advice to any young artist. The art of tomorrow will not be as new if we worry about how the audience of today sees it.

Fever Pitch Magazine enquiries can be sent to Stella Joseph-Jarecki through stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com

Composer, flautist

Sean Quinn is a Melbourne based composer who is currently in the midst of his Bachelor of Muisc (perf) at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Since beginning his studies, Sean has been throwing himself into every opportunity to engage with the community. His desire to learn and create have driven him to write for unconventional instrumentations of recent, and to engage with chamber musicians in alternative ways. His works have been performed at various venues around Melbourne and in Tasmania by groups such as Allotropy! String Quartet – alongside works by Melbourne based composers Andrew Batterham, Luke Severn and Joe Chindamo – and Speak Percussion – as part of the TENOR Network Conference. He has planned commissions with a number of groups, including cycles for Duo Eclettico (biome tales), Olinda Quartet (morphonos), Forest Collective (thicket) and many more. Sean’s music is also being circulated around the Conservatorium, with planned premieres at recitals by a variety of instrumental students in the next 12 months.

Sean’s main compositional influences include music by Ligeti, Messiaen, Chin and Boulez; as well as American influence from the likes of Cage, Feldman and Wolff. Sean often thinks about space and place being more important that time in music, as it is relative to what occurs within it. He is also deeply influenced by the music of Australian composers Peter Sculthorpe and Ross Edwards.

Read Sean’s opinion piece ‘Experimental?’ here

Keep up to date with Sean’s composing adventures on Facebook here, on Instagram here, and his official website can be found here

Sean is the founder of chamber music ensemble Children of the Millennium, which focuses on performing works of the 20th and 21st Century. Facebook page here, Instagram page here

By Stella Joseph-Jarecki (Enquiries: stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com)

I recently had the chance to chat to Bailey Montgomerie and Alex Gorbatov, two enterprising and passionate music students who established chamber vocal ensemble Divisi Chamber Singers in the early months of 2019. All members of Divisi are in their early twenties, and most are balancing university studies with jobs and other projects. It is fabulous to see young musicians boldly create opportunities for themselves and upcoming composers, so I wanted to quiz these two on all the things they have learnt over a year of running the ensemble.

If you like what you read in the interview below, please consider reading more about Divisi’s upcoming Compose Queer project, currently fundraising on the Australia Cultural Fund page. Divisi will be commissioning pieces from four young queer composers and premiering them in concert in 2020, alongside a premiere of a piece by composer Sally Whitwell. Find out more here

Divisi’s upcoming concert Cecilia will take place on the 22nd of November at Christ Church Brunswick. Entry is by donation and all proceeds will go towards the upkeep of the ensemble and their future projects. The concert will include a new work by young Melbourne composer Max McConnell. Facebook event linked here

Divisi’s website can be found here, and Facebook page here

SJJ: Why did you both start up Divisi ensemble? Why did you feel like the world needed another chamber vocal ensemble?

BM: There are two parts to that answer. The first one is, it was an opportunity for us to develop our own musical abilities and skills. While the Melbourne Conservatorium is great, and the teachers are sometimes walking encyclopedias of musical knowledge, it doesn’t give you everything.

Things like industry experience and industry placement, which the Ignite Lab program at uni is trying to provide to an extent, generally get missed out on by the populace of the Conservatorium. And those things are obviously very, very important to your development as a musician. You can have all the technique and interpretation training you want, but if you don’t have any industry experience, you may as well not be doing it.

SJJ: You can’t be a performer in theory, you have to actually get out there. And it’s scary to get out there, because most of us performers are perfectionists. You don’t want to go out there and do something that’s crap. But I don’t think you ever feel ready.

BM: Exactly. It was also because there was no chamber choral music program at the uni outside of Chamber Choir and Early Voices. It was something that we thought we could create for ourselves… not only would we get experience in managing it, but we’d be able to explore the repertoire in the same way that we get to explore solo repertoire through the Bachelor of Music.

We had noticed a rising of little independent ensembles like Luminescence Chamber Singers, run by our friends in Canberra. And we thought, there seems to be a market here that’s untapped. We knew the only way were going to be ready to start up our own ensemble was just to jump in, and make ourselves ready.

Sure enough, we’ve been chatting to some people like the Polyphonic Voices ensemble, and they’ve been saying that there hundred new vocal octets springing up. And they’re not really knowing how to run a marketing campaign. Because while our musical ability is still developing, we’ve learned how to market the crap out of a concert! And in that sense, we’re actually well ahead of a lot of the other chamber singing ensembles.

And the third part of it was that we love it and really wanted to do it.

SJJ: Both of you took part in the Gondwana choir program… can you tell me little about how you ended up singing chamber music?

AG: I was very fortunate to have a principal in primary school who noticed I could sing and pointed me in the direction of Lyn Williams and the fantastic Sydney Children’s Choir, which is under the Gondwana banner, and a mum who really wanted me to have a strong musical education. Even if at times it involved literally (and I mean, quite literally) dragging me to rehearsals. So I’ve been singing in choirs since I was six years old. I also started playing piano at around that time but it’s very much a secondary instrument for me.

Sydney Children’s Choir, and by extension Gondwana, has provided the core of my singing world. Apart from forcing me to sing once a week for eleven years straight, the program exposed me to contemporary Australian music and mandated theory and aural training at a scale I’m only just starting to understand.

Choirs have always been my focus and in 2015 and 2016 I had the pleasure of touring with Gondwana Chorale as their youngest member. That ensemble showed me a new standard of choral music that I had not appreciated before and also that Australia had the ability to produce the absolute pinnacle of music of this type. It was also in 2016 that I started doing some barbershop repertoire, and listening to groups like Luminescence and The Song Company, which helped me realise that I wanted to sing this music. It was also through Gondwana choirs that Bailey and I (and a few other members of Divisi) really got to know each other.

SJJ: With social media and marketing, what are some things that you’ve picked up through the process of throwing yourself in the deep end, about putting on concerts, marketing concerts, and actually getting people to come?

BM: The biggest thing for me has been discovering the wonderful world of data. We can access certain analytics through our Facebook page for Divisi and the ticketing website Eventbrite. We can see when people are visiting our site, what posts are getting the most engagement, what social media activity is leading to sales… We use this data to refine our marketing strategy and more efficiently translate social media engagement into ticket sales.

Obviously there’s no substitute for just posting and harassing people but you don’t actually have to do that as much produce the same results, if you are able to target people more directly. And analytics and data have been a super wonderful way of doing that.

SJJ: How do you both approach time management? In regards to social media and having a regular posting schedule, how do you approach that in a sustainable way?

BM: That has actually been really difficult for us over the past few months, especially in the lead up to the last concert. We worked out recently that the method we’ve been following, aka splitting every job between Alex and I, and squeezing them into whatever time we don’t have assessments or work, just isn’t sustainable. It’s been causing us to miss things that we could be doing to maximize the efficiency of the choir and getting bums on seats…

So we had a meeting with the head of Ignite Lab to tackle this [Susan Eldridge, member of staff at Melbourne Conservatorium of Music]. Right now we’re in the process of delegating a couple of roles so we can have a coherent framework of who’s doing what.

Things like, having an operations manager, someone in charge of managing the finances, someone running marketing, those kinds of roles. Julia Krivoshev, one of our sopranos, will be taking over social media and marketing for us, which will be super useful.

While there have been challenges, the great thing at the moment is Alex and I are totally accountable to one another. We know we’ll get the jobs done. But with delegating tasks and creating a framework, we’ve become aware that it is a fine line, of working out how to avoid micro-managing, while still actually managing.

AG: The more creative part of the planning is split. Often one of us will have an okay idea, and the other will run with it and turn it into a pretty good idea.

Deciding on repertoire is a very collaborative process. We go back and forth between the two of us to make sure the pieces aren’t unrealistically difficult and the right fit for the concerts. This is one of the more time-consuming steps of the preparation, but also one of the most enjoyable. It often involves a bottle of red, very loud choral music, hysterical laughter, and going off track into realms of repertoire we should definitely not attempt in the near future…

SJJ: How do you and Alex approach the curatorship of your programs?

BM: Aside from the actual rehearsal process, the curatorship is probably the most creative part of the project. Sometimes it’s a name, like Tallis to Tavener, which had such a nice ring to it that we just had to do it. It’s a pretty name which actually created a coherent theme that we could explore. The Divisi in Recital program started with the concept of showcasing what the choir could do, and we also wanted to perform a specific set of pieces by Arvo Pärt.

Often it will emerge from either repertoire that we want to perform and we curate a theme around, or it’ll start with the theme and we’ll curate repertoire around that. The curation process can start from any one point. You work backwards, forwards, sideways, two steps forward, two steps down… It’s very creative. We’ve got so many ideas written down now, it’s frankly crazy.

SJJ: Who are some composers who inspire you both?

AG: That’s a hard question! Firstly, our good friend Johann Sebastian Bach. His vocal music is terribly difficult to sing because he was a bit mean to vocalists, but the result is incredible. If you listen to his motets, although he didn’t really care about them too much, he was doing all this incredibly interesting word painting and textural stuff that was a few hundred years ahead of his time.

Out of the renaissance basket I love singing William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. The masses for three, four, five voices have this incredible rhythmic feel to them which make them so fun to sing.  I had the opportunity to sing some of the Eton song book a few months ago and it is like Byrd on crack. More complex, more interesting, more clash, and we know even less about how it was performed.

While we are in the British Isles, I’ve been loving Henry Purcell lately. He is so expressive in his use of dissonance. I won’t keep going, because every times I say the name a Baroque or Renaissance composer, another one pops into my head…

On the contemporary side, I’ve just become addicted to Gavin Bryars and have been recently singing a bunch of Arvo Pärt. Essentially, anything with a good deal of clashy-ness and some genius and thought apparent in the writing will make me pretty happy.

BM: Yep, Johann Sebastian Bach. He reminds me every day exactly why I love singing so much. His music is just so pleasant to sing, and there’s also an implicit goal. One of the reasons we created Divisi was because we want to perform the Bach motets in concert one day. So that is a future project that we will take on when we’re ready.

I would also name Arvo Pärt. His music is fascinating, in that experimental style. It’s almost like the music was conceived in a slightly different way. Those natural instincts you have about phrasing and dynamics, basically your musical intuition, you have to completely rethink them. His style is informed by a very particular set of factors. Tintinnabuli, the ringing of the bell, is a central idea to his entire musical world. And you have to curate the performance style around that… you try to avoid bringing in your general musical intuition and really approach it from the ground up rather than bringing in outside knowledge.

I would expand that comment to a lot of other 20th century composers. The composers pushing boundaries, rethinking music, those composers definitely make me feel personally like I’m in the right profession. The music is so much fun and very intellectually engaging, even if their music isn’t as consonant as I might like.

And Baroque and Renaissance composers generally! Alex and I are early music nerds. For the same reason that we like 20th century composers, those composers were pushing the boundaries of music during their time as well. They actually thought about music in a very different way, in a way that that was in a sense developing the tradition that we have today.

Renaissance composers discovered a whole lot of chromatic music theory, hundreds of years before anyone else did. Because the ways there were conceiving music were so fundamentally different and strange. And it’s really interesting to discover those sort of divergent ways of thinking in the same vein in the world of 20th century composers.

SJJ: So what is up next for Divisi?

BM: Once we began programming our own programs, we started to recognize the problem with Western composition being dominated by straight white men. Even though we have geniuses like Hildegard and a bunch of interesting composers from the 20th and 21st century; female composers, composers of colour, queer composers…

Our next project involves something that we are really passionate about- programming composers whose work may not be getting heard, because of social factors that have lasted as long as music has in the western tradition.

The project is called Compose Queer. We’re going to be commissioning a handful of queer composers, preferably young people who are from Melbourne or Sydney, and will be performing their works next year in concert. Sally Whitwell, one of the premier queer classical composers in Australia, is going to come down and headline the concert for us… and hopefully work with the young composers as well! She’s very experienced at choral writing because she’s worked with choirs the majority of her musical career. She’s kindly allowing us to premiere a piece of hers as well.

We want to do our part for the queer classical music community. It’s a community which is very sparse, because it’s such a niche area. And naturally that’s going to turn a lot of people away. Especially people that might have particular barriers to getting into the profession in the first place… generally speaking, those who aren’t expressly fitting in the heteronormative model of personhood in Western society today. And we want it to be more than just an awareness campaign. It’s actually putting money into the pockets, and giving notoriety to, the people who need the money and the notoriety. And hopefully setting a precedent for other ensembles to not just program a bunch of dead white guys, basically.

We’re really keen to perform some new works. Our upcoming concert Cecilia features a new work by Max McConnell, a local composer from the Conservatorium.

SJJ: What is your favourite thing about being in a chamber music group?

AG: I love large choirs, they produce a fantastic sound, but it is often so safe. There isn’t the same sense of risk, and essentially there’s one uniform sound. If you compare the sound of the world’s best large choirs, the differences are minor. If you listen to Voces 8, The Song Company, Fieri Consort, etc, they produce unique and wonderful sounds with a versatility and agility you can’t get out of large choir. And there is something special about the trust you have between the eight of you. It becomes a very intimate experience.

BM: My favourite thing would be achieving level of ensemble, where you approach a cadence point in a piece of music, and the chord is so perfectly in tune that you just feel it in your bones. And you can hear upper partials as well in the room when the acoustics are good, and you know that that is the exact resonant frequency of the chord and you did it… That feeling is a little bit addictive. And so musically satisfying.

The development of ensemble skills is a big thing for me. One massive reason I like chamber vocal music is the ensemble communication aspect. Developing it in others is another important goal. We’ve had a couple of members of the choir who have just come leaps and bounds in terms of their ensemble skills reading skills, and it’s been really rewarding to see. And the social-ness of it as well…. the reason so many people sing in choirs who aren’t necessarily serious singers, is because it’s a great social experience.

Tenor, co-director of Divisi Chamber Singers

Alex Gorbatov is an emerging tenor and choral director who pairs his music making with mathematical and analytical studies.

Alex’s choral journey began with Gondwana Choirs. After 11 years singing with Gondwana and other large choirs, he now primarily performs as a chamber musician and consort singer. Alex has appeared with Luminesce Chamber Singers, Polyphonic Voices, and with his own ensemble: Divisi Chamber Singers. Alex is also an emerging musical director. In addition to his work as artistic director of Divisi Chamber Singers, he has taken up the baton with Apollo Choir, Divisi, and recently appeared as an assistant conductor under Marianne Rigby-Black for the University of Melbourne’s All Staff Choir.

Alex is particularly passionate about creating opportunities that enable young musicians to perform and have their works performed. He works regularly with new composers and prioritizes programming of young Australian composers.

Baritone, co-director of Divisi Chamber Singers

Bailey Montgomerie is currently a student of classical voice, and politics and international relations at the University of Melbourne. A graduate of Newtown High School of Performing Arts, he currently trains under Anna Connolly.

Bailey has sung with a number of pronounced Australian ensembles including the Sydney Philharmonic Choir and the Hamer Singers. He has also sung with the prestigious Gondwana Chorale during their European tour, during which he received a master class from a global authority on choral music Stephen Layton of Trinity College, Cambridge. Currently Bailey sings with Polyphonic Voices and spends most of his time as co-artistic director of his own chamber ensemble Divisi Chamber Singers. The octet is steadily becoming a significant group in the network of Melbourne chamber ensembles.

Presented by chamber choir Candlelight VOX at The Seafarer’s Dome, 1st and 2nd November 2019.

By Nathan Michael Wright. Attended 2^nd November.

Our fast-paced society often leaves us feeling stressed, frantic and out of time. Candlelight VOX presents an antidote with Pause, which focuses on music encouraging stillness and meditation.

Candlelight VOX have gone from strength to strength since their founding in 2017, and as a student led ensemble have presented a program with plenty to offer. Set within the Missions to Seafarer’s Norla Dome, the venue choice could not have been better, allowing the musicians to surround the audience to great effect. It is important to note that Pause does come with a ticket price, which makes this a professional offering, and so this reviewer had a couple of minor gripes that should be addressed. There were a few missed notes, as well as the interference of two techs that were not in theatre blacks that changed microphones between each number. However, these are minor faults when considering the amount of talent on display within Pause.

Pause presents a shockingly large amount of Melbourne musical talent. Listeners were treated to not only to the music of the choir, but also to the Storage room String Quartet. Soloists were also in abundance, particular highlights included singer Lisette Bolton and an exceptional performance from percussionist Bridget Bourne on the Vibraphone (presenting compositions by George Cox) which was an absolute standout. Both Lisette and Bridget are two of the finest young musicians you could hope to hear within Australia, and are certainly ones to look out for on the professional circuit in the very near future.

The choir performed at its best when co-artistic director and conductor Grace Gallur was at the helm. Rather than acting as a reserved and pious conductor of choral music, Grace came alive as a visual conduit for the choir to follow; her powerful passion for the music she was conducting was unashamedly on full display, and was an absolute joy to watch as well as to hear. The choir responded in kind, with particular highlights including performances of Tavener’s As One Who Has Slept and Paul Mealor’s Drop, Drop, Slow Tears.

John Cage’s notorious 4’33” was also included, and within a program emphasising stillness and meditation was a powerful statement, reminding us to stop, slow down and breathe.

Candlelight VOX should be exceptionally proud of what they have presented here. The amount of musical talent and passion on display for the ticket price is truly exceptional, made even more impressive when reminded that the entire ensemble consists of students. When considering the aim of this choir is to showcase the music of living composers and nurture Melbourne’s up and coming musical talent, Melbourne music lovers should make sure to keep and ear out for Candlelight VOX in the future.     

Candlelight VOX’s Facebook page can be found here, their website here

Fever Pitch Magazine enquiries can be sent to Stella Joseph-Jarecki through stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com

By Stella Joseph-Jarecki (Enquiries: stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com)

I recently had the chance to fire eight questions at Melbourne musician James Seymour, on the highs and lows of being a professional singer-songwriter. James has recently released his debut album Cut Your Teeth, under his moniker Feelds. Listen to Cut Your Teeth on Spotify here, on Bandcamp here

Feelds’ Facebook page can be found here, and official website here

Feelds will be launching his album at the Gasometer Hotel, 8pm, Thursday 14^th November. Tickets from $15, can be purchased here

When did you realise you wanted to pursue music performance more seriously in your life?

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been doing some kind of musical performance. I’ve played a handful of different instruments across different projects and setups… And the more music I wrote, the more music performance became a staple in my life. I figure that much like any other musician, I’ve found a way of writing and performing that reflects me, and I suppose as a musician in today’s climate the best way to express that is through live performance.

Your debut album ‘Cut Your Teeth’ was sparked by the discovery of a photo album put together from when your parents met and went on ‘Karate Camp’ in the 80s. Could you tell us a little about how that inspired you?

My parent’s past as athletes wasn’t a world that I had explored much before finding that photo album – mainly, I guess, because they gave those types of things up when they started a family. With that in mind, those amazing photos sparked a desire to elaborate upon the story through songwriting. The album’s journey explores how we respond and react to things around us as human beings, essentially how our own experiences inevitably shape who we are.

How did you find yourself with Fright Night Music management?

Dean Valentino (who runs FN) is a long-time friend of mine. We met over a decade ago when our first band projects used to gig on the same line-ups around Melbourne. Since then, we’ve been through quite a lot together (both musically and otherwise), and when I started the Feelds project, he was right there, eager to give me a hand with whatever I was doing. I guess it snowballed from there, and now, here we are!

Who are some of your musical influences?

The biggest influence on my music and how I think about musicality is Justin Vernon. I really admire not only the way he constantly pushes boundaries and challenges himself, but the way he involves the community around him and the people that inspire him to influence what he does as well. The bands I’m obsessed with at the moment are Pinegrove and Saintseneca.

What are your favourite things about the contemporary music scene in Melbourne?

The community of creatives that surrounds it, undoubtedly. As an independent artist that lives and breathes music, having a supportive, collaborative and challenging network of like-minded people is so important – especially when you’re trying to make a career out of writing and performing music.

The first and last tracks on the album feature spoken word samples, and the first one is quite a lovely reflection on how we should pursue our individual goals in life despite what others may want. Can you tell us a bit about incorporating those clips into the album?

I met David ‘Papi’ Hunt on a university trip to LA in 2015. He was our guide/bus driver one day on a tour of the city, and I found him to be full of life, experience and insight. Instead of walking off on our lunch break, a friend and I sat down with ‘Papi’ amidst the food court of a bustling Los Angeles street market to pick his brains. We sat and listened for over an hour to his stories and viewpoints on life, being an older, Melungeon-Indian born man raised in the Appalachian Mountains. Snippets and sound bites from this conversation are sprinkled throughout the album – moments and words that really resonated with and stuck with me all this time later.

The album was written, recorded and mixed in your Melbourne studio. Do you think that helped to give it a distinctive character and musical sound?

For sure! The limitation of gear and space had a big influence on the sounds and techniques I developed in my home studio. That situation forced my thought process to be more decisive, less complicated. I loved becoming extremely familiar with my equipment and knowing exactly what each tool could be used for.

What are some of the most rewarding and challenging aspects of gigging and touring?

As simple as it sounds, seeing people getting involved with what we’re doing on stage is pretty darn rewarding! The most challenging thing about gigging and touring would be something along the lines of staying true to yourself, and trying to not let that setting affect how you might usually act. Making sure you’re still reflecting the things you truly believe in.

Singer-songwriter, instrumentalist

There is something intriguing around the idea of the unknown. Whether this comes to Feelds as a thirst for exploration or a relentless drive for self-discovery, onward seems to be the only direction.

Since releasing a string of self-produced singles in the latter half of 2016, the Melbourne-based project of James Seymour has grown miles forward into a fully-fledged outfit, defined by clever songwriting used to provoke a dynamic soundscape of honest storytelling. A new level of performance was struck in 2017 with the addition of a live band, allowing the following two singles, ‘Colourblind’ and ‘Crazy Neighbours’ to pave the way for a debut EP release in the early stages of 2018. The self-produced EP, ‘Hunch’, was independently-released to a sold out hometown crowd in Melbourne, has gained national radio success, received over 1.25 Million streams on Spotify, and allowed Feelds to tour across the country in support of the likes of Didirri, Hayden Calnin, Fan Girl & BATTS.

By Stella Joseph-Jarecki (Enquiries: stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com)

On the 1st November, chamber vocal ensemble The Song Company presented Nineteen to the Dozen at the Melbourne Recital Centre. In their words, this concert presented a “tapestry of 20 compact untitled commissions from 19 Australian composers, playlisted against fragmented miniatures from each of the last 12 centuries.” Each individual fragment was about 2 minutes long.

The program was stylistically a mixed bag. I think it is worth mentioning that the listening experience might have been enhanced if it didn’t involve quite as much rapid-fire aural stimulation. The downside of having so many commissions, and running straight through the program from start to finish, was that it was hard to fully absorb any of the pieces as an audience member, particularly as they were so brief.

However, I would like to acknowledge that it is a great thing for a local group to commission so many new works by Australian composers. It would be fantastic to perhaps see a program by The Song Company where they commission three or four composers to write ten minute pieces, which would give the compositions space to breathe (both for the composers themselves in writing the pieces and for the audience members in listening to them).

It was interesting to note that a number of the commissioned vignettes were in a similar sound world, featuring experimentation with soundscapes and vocal effects, such as intentional vocal fry, trills, almost machine-esque noises and vocalisations on particular pitches. The risk with this particular style of overtly modern vocal music is that after a certain point it can sound like arbitrarily ‘weird’ noise for the sake of it, particularly if the piece finishes without building to a climax or experimenting with levels in dynamics and tone.

However, a number of the commissions managed to experiment with the limits of the human voice. To name a handful, offerings from Sally Whitwell, Felicity Wilcox, Josephine Gibson and Matthew Hindson retained a contemporary edge while having a distinct artistic vision for their two-minute pieces.

The eight members of The Song Company displayed a steely resolve and a level of concentration that would be incredibly hard to maintain with the more unstructured pieces. And of course, they possessed a beautiful blend of voices, one which particularly touched this listener with the more traditional choral fragments, such as a stunning Locus Iste (Bruckner) and O virtus Sapientiae (Hildegard of Bingen). The vocal abilities of the female section of the ensemble particularly impressed, featuring a powerhouse, at times operatic soprano voice from Amy Moore and full-bodied mezzo warmth from Stephanie Dillon.

The Song Company are clearly a sharply talented and forward-thinking vocal group, and one to certainly watch out for in the classical and cross-over scene in Melbourne. I look forward to seeing what they present in 2020.

Nineteen to the Dozen featured the vocal talents of:

Anna Sandström- soprano

Amy Moore- soprano

Stephanie Dillon- alto

Jessica O’Donoghue- alto

Dan Walker- tenor

Koen van Stade- tenor

Hayden Barrington- bass

Thomas Flint – bass

Conducted by: Antony Pitts

You can follow the work of The Song Company through their website, Instagram and Facebook page.

In March 2020, The Song Company will be collaborating and performing with The Tallis Scholars from England, the Netherlands Chamber Choir (Nederlands Kamerkoor) and the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir (Det Norske Solistkor) as part of a series of concerts under the banner of 150 Psalms.  

An excerpt from the Adelaide Festival website:

Over four days, in four sacred spaces and one secular space, 12 concerts will encompass all 150 psalms in musical settings by 150 different composers spanning 10 centuries of choral tradition. From Gregorian chant to Ockeghem, from Monteverdi to Bach, from Brahms to Britten and beyond. Many Australian premieres, and world premieres of newly commissioned works by Elena Kats-Chernin, Clare Maclean, Cathy Milliken and Kate Moore. In the final concert all the voices converge in the Adelaide Town Hall for Tallis’ mighty motet in 40 individual parts, Spem in alium.

Find out more here

By Stella Joseph-Jarecki (Enquiries: stellamusicwriter.wordpress.com)

I had the chance to speak to James Penn, co-director of emerging chamber opera company BK Opera alongside creative partner Kate Millet, about the things he has learnt over three years of running the company and mounting productions. You can follow BK Opera’s work through their website and Facebook page.

BK Opera’s next show will be La Bohème, staged in a stripped back style in a pub, the Wesley Anne in Northcote. Check out the Facebook event here, tickets can be found here.

Has it been interesting approaching the practice of conducting singers, as a singer yourself?

It has been a learning experience for sure! You can encounter this duality, of singers trying to be helpful by wanting to do what you want as a conductor, but it can actually be unhelpful when they don’t tell you if something really works for their voice. So I’m trying to work out what’s comfortable for them, and sometimes they don’t know themselves what’s comfortable for them yet. So it comes down to that idea of an artist knowing themselves. You can find yourself in a situation where the singer directs the question back to you and says ‘Oh, no, what do you want?’ but it’s like, well I don’t want to ask you to do something ridiculous, I’m not going to ask you to sing a top D standing on your head. A reasonable request is one thing for me and another thing for someone else. People have different techniques.

Absolutely. So BK Opera is in its third year now, what prompted you to establish the company?

BK Opera was established in 2016, by myself and my dear friend Kate Millett. Kate has a background in black box theatre and we met doing a small Gilbert and Sullivan production. We spoke about drama, about opera… I’m an opera snob and she’s a drama snob, and you know, we started talking and we became best friends. So a year after that, we decided, let’s do something. Let’s do a show. It started as, let’s do a show, and I personally didn’t expect it to continue beyond one show, which was Georges Bizet’s Carmen. But Carmen was successful and we had a lot of interest. And we’ve been going ever since.

So I guess what prompted us to start, was that I really like French opera, and I really wanted to conduct an opera in French. Basically, I just wanted to do something. And I was done waiting around for people to give me an opportunity.

And really it is a really difficult thing to put together because there are so many things involved behind the scenes. We just finished Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. We had an electronic track playing the orchestral music. I engaged one of my friends Kym Dillon to compose that arrangement. The things involved with liaising with him, and working with the software was like a whole orchestral rehearsal in itself… Working with the Hungarian language coaches, sorting the costumes, the social media and everything else, it became really difficult. But creating our own opportunities was the motivation behind it.

Wow. So the orchestral music was in the form of an electronic track?

So I had this crazy idea last year where I thought, well electronic music is not that different from symphonic music in terms of the textures and the way the textures play together. And with Bartók, the colours are so important, and so dense, and so ridiculous. And what is written on the page is not actually what you’re supposed to play because it’s based on Hungarian music, which you really can’t write down exactly with the notation that we have. So working with Logic and working with all the different layers effectively became the orchestral rehearsals. It was painstaking, but it was certainly rewarding.

So I can imagine the list of things you need to do for each production is exhaustive, from conceiving a show to actually staging it and promoting it. Can you give us a brief idea of how that process looks for you, perhaps using one show as an example?

At the moment, Kate and I run BK Opera on our own. So things can become very time-intensive, from the conception to the last cut off of the show, and the bump out…

So the way we approach things, is we don’t say, oh we are doing this show, and then have people come out and audition for that particular show. ‘Build it and they will come’ doesn’t work! So we would hold general auditions and base the shows we do on the singers who come to us. We always have ideas floating around, but if we can’t cast it, it’s obviously not going to happen. For example, we wanted to do Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio for a while. We didn’t have the appropriate people audition so we didn’t do it, but we did end up being able to stage it last year.

In 2017 we did Francis Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine. We’d had a lot of soprani audition for us that year. So I thought okay well, how do we work with that? I’d always loved Poulenc and I came across this opera La Voix Humaine, which is a one-woman opera. And I thought, we could split this role into four parts, because developing singers probably won’t have secure enough technique to be able to stand on stage for an hour and just deliver this really intense French text. So that’s what we did, we had the role shared by three sopranos and a mezzo-soprano. So the role darkened in colour as the opera progressed, and had all these different colours of soprani. So from a musical perspective that was how that started.

The text was also really difficult for that show. As a French speaker, I decided well, during the last weeks of the previous show, let’s just work through the text and really get it second nature. It’s not standard French lyric diction. It’s very much boozy and slang. It’s abbreviated and it’s quick and for it to be effective, it has to sound like the singer is fluent in the language. So it was about getting that text second nature. And because it was a very dramatic piece, getting the drama in their bodies. So that process started before we did formal rehearsals.

[You can watch the full production on La Voix Humaine on YouTube, Part 1 is linked here, Part 2 linked here]

In terms of logistics, Kate books the venues, which usually happens quite early on. So we’ll decide on the shows, and then book the venues about six months in advance. Things do change, because as Terry Pratchett said, opera exists on a catastrophe curve; everything that can go wrong will go wrong. So you have to make sure things can’t go wrong. Getting those things solidly in place early. I guess when singers have issues and can’t do the shows anymore and stuff like that, we deal with those situations as they come. Some things you can’t plan for, like someone dropping out of a show or not turning up to a Sitzprobe without any explanation.

But running BK Opera has really taught me how valuable preparation is, and how valuable practice is. Even being in situations where I haven’t been as prepared with projects for the company, and having to go oh, okay, I need to go home and look at this. As they say, preparation prevents piss-poor performance!

And it’s helped even my practice as a singer, having a different view on the music as a conductor and as a singer. It’s also taught me that having a good voice is not enough. Because there are so many incredible singers out there! And from singers coming to me as the conductor, it has forced me to go, oh, actually the singers I want to work with are the ones who put the work in, not necessarily the ones with the best voices.

You mentioned to me earlier that you have some thoughts on the importance of young classically-trained singers gaining an understanding of themselves as artists. It can be so hard for young singers because as you said, there is so much repertoire we aren’t ready to sing. How do you advise young singers get to know themselves and their abilities?

I was asked this recently. Because I always say this to people, and it’s a tragic thing that I have to say this, but you have to be discerning.  Not everyone has your best interest at heart. That’s something I wish I knew before I got out of uni, before I finished my postgraduate degree. At uni they were kind of saying, oh you’ll go and you’ll get this huge job after you get out of uni at the age of twenty-two… I mean no. They’re selling a fantasy.

But yeah, not everyone has your best interests. And not necessarily in a malicious sense. You mentioned people learn by trial and error and I was asked recently, how do I practice discernment? How do I become discerning with people and how I say no to stuff? And I answered well, I’m still trying to find the answer to that.

Because I learnt it the hard way. Through having experiences that weren’t the best thing for me. Having to go back and say, all right, what is the best thing for me? I had to bring it back and just do my scales. Practice the tedious, seemingly rudimentary stuff. But doing that has really had a profound affect on my voice.

I think a lot of it is going through the stuff that isn’t good for you and just learning what that looks like, so in the future you can say no. I’ve been offered things before, where I’ve had to be like, nope, that’s too much for me. There was one thing when I was twenty-four years old. And I’m lucky I had that discernment but because some people just say, oh any opportunity is good. And then a singer says no and is called a diva. But once you know yourself and what you’re capable of, you can with confidence say no.

So why did you start the company BK Opera? What do you try to offer as an organisation, and what do you think makes you guys unique in this artistic space in Melbourne?

So over the three years that we’ve been in existence, we have offered bare-bones operas, mostly interpretations of French grand operas, that are socially responsible.

There are clearly some texts out there that have different views on things, like the place of women in society, how people get to treat each other, problematic views on race, etc. So we try to be conscious of that. For example with Carmen, it’s clearly about someone who falls in love with a woman and because she doesn’t love him back, he murders her. What we offered was a framing of that issue as ‘this is a bad thing’. This is rape culture. This is someone who murders a woman because she doesn’t love him. We try to be socially responsible.

Framing things like Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio. We completely changed the setting, as it was originally quite racist in nature. So we completely changed the setting and focused on a different theme that was in the text. The ideas of claustrophobia and being stuck and being emotionally abused by someone…

So dramatically, that’s what we offer. As a small company we wanted to add to and enrich the cultural landscape. I think my favourite show that we’ve done was Jules Massenet’s Werther. Instead of it being about dying for love, we explored the issue of mental illness.  

Additionally, the environment I’ve tried to create is a safe space for emerging artists. I mean, whatever your age. It’s not as if you have to be between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six and as soon as you’re twenty-seven it’s like, goodbye! But a safe space for emerging artists to explore repertoire, knowing that it’s okay to make mistakes.

How do you find approaching the very valid process of not only refreshing or repositioning a text, but finding the parts in the text that you want to focus on? Basically working out how you want to represent something to a modern audience.

It’s about how you frame the issues in my view. For example, there’s an opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck called Armide. It’s about a sorceress who wants to fall in love with a crusader. She gives him a love potion and basically drugs him. It’s very awkward but my opinion is, it shouldn’t be that you don’t present something… You should frame that event as an issue of assault and present it that way. It’s about finding stuff in the text that you can present that is valid. And I suppose, not contriving it or transforming it into something random or shocking.

Because these are still valid issues. I mean Werther, there’s a valid issue of depression and in La Traviata there’s a valid issue of how people demonize sex workers and in La Voix Humaine, she kills herself with sleeping pills. It’s a still contemporary issue.

So not shying away or downplaying the problematic aspects of the text, but challenging them, and very openly framing the issue for what it is.

So in your opinion, who are some composers who are overlooked in the staging of opera in Australia? Even perhaps some composers who you think are overrated…

Oh yes, I have lots! There’s a French composer who changed his name to Ernest Reyer, who wrote an opera which has the same story as Wagner’s Siegfried, but sung in French and called Sigurd.  A lot of singers when they approached the Paris Opera say, oh I sing both Brünhildes! I think that opera has had not enough attention. [A YouTube clip of the opera can be found here]

I think La Juive by Fromental Halévy doesn’t get a lot of attention. It’s actually being done by Opera Australia next year. A Jewish composer writing an opera during quite an anti-Semitic time…

I think Mozart gets too much attention. I really don’t get it. When Mozart was writing Così fan tutte, ‘All women are like that’, and during the same era, Gluck was writing something about the issues of sexual assault… I don’t get it. I don’t understand it.

There was an opera that I think was only performed once, by Josef Canteloube. Canteloube transcribed a lot of French folk music and he wrote an opera about Vercingetorix, a Gallic war chief…. I think it was only ever performed once in the 1930s. There’s a clip of it on YouTube with Georges Thill singing it in the presence of the composer.

There was a church composer around the same time as Pietro Mascagni and Giacomo Puccini, Lorenzo Perosi. The three of them were actually great friends. He was part of the giovane scuola school of composers, with figures such as Puccini, Mascagni, Umberto Giordano… The verismo school of opera. They all composed opera, but Perosi didn’t, because he was the conductor of the Sistine Choir in Rome and he composed almost exclusively Roman Catholic Church music. He was also severely mentally unwell. He suffered severe psychosis and was in and out of institutions. Puccini and Mascagni actually said “There is more music in his head than all of us combined”. His last oratorio was about judgment day and it was very dark. I don’t know if it’s out of copyright yet, and it’s not really done outside of the church, to be honest no one really knows him even in the church. Now people do Giovanni Palestrina. People tend to see Perosi as old-fashioned.

He was like an operatic composer who didn’t compose opera. He was mental, but fascinating. On YouTube there is a full performance with him at the podium conducting, and the person singing Jesus is Beniamino Gigli, the famous tenor, and they were really great friends. So this really famous, great singer was premiering the works in Rome. So I think that’s really great we have that on record. I show it to people and they go, oh that’s so old-fashioned and over the top!

Ah but what isn’t in opera, after all!

Exactly. So yeah, I think Mozart is overrated, Gluck is underdone… It’s just interesting that in Così there are all these caricatures of women and then in Iphigénie en Aulide (by Gluck) there’s a tormented Greek princess who has to kill her brother. Nothing to do with sex or love in that.