Sitting here on a plane on my way to Melbourne as the sun rises in the east, I muse this morning on the excellent playing of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Last night was the second Symphony in The Park – held on Stage 88 – a free event that showcases the orchestra. The first year was a classical affair and last night was a Broadway night with singers Peter Cousens and Trisha Crowe, and yours truly waving the stick. The CSO is in fine form these days. With Nicholas Milton as chief conductor and the wonderful Barbara Jane Gilby as leader, it plays with real energy. I am always interested in the internal energy of an orchestra. The best ones are like well-groomed race horses, you only need to turn them in the right direction and they’ll glide down the track doing all the hard work themselves, without needing to crack the whip that much. Canberra is in that league, I think, and certainly improving every year. The orchestra gets most of its funding from a very supportive ACT government, and very little from a less supportive Federal Government. The Canberra Symphony is incredible bang for buck, because as it’s…

I will begin by describing my two most recent musical experiences. Last night, I attended a performance of Jersey Boys at the Theatre Royal. For those unfamiliar with the musical, Jersey Boys tracks the formation, successes and ultimate disbanding of 60s pop group The Four Seasons. It is interspersed with various bits and pieces of the band’s hits – another of those “Jukebox musicals”. While I probably don’t fall into the production’s target audience, I did enjoy it. This was my pop music experience. This morning, in a composition analysis class, we listened to and analysed Iannis Xenakis‘ 1961 solo piano work Herma. For those unfamiliar with the piece, Herma is as much an exercise in mathematical set theory as it is a composition. Xenakis divides the 88 notes on a piano into a few different pitch sets. He then bases sections of the piece on pitches obtained through various set operations. The processes are fairly straightforward, but to apply them to music is… very Xenakis. He was, after all, a mathematician and qualified architect – something which heavily influenced other works such as Metastasis. This was my art music experience. As you can imagine, these two heavily contrasting listening…

When was the last time you experienced a Concert Conversion: a live performance that made you sit up wide-eyed and –eared to completely re-evaluate an artist?

Time flies when you’re having Wagner. Our two months in London are over now, just like that (in fact I’m already writing to you from New York) and in the last four weeks I managed to see something like six performances of Parsifal at the English National Opera. And nor was I just doing my duty for the Tenor In My Life (dare I acronymise him? TTIML?). It turns out I really, really like Parsifal, which before the start of this year I’d never heard in its entirety. The circumstances helped, of course. Nikolaus Lehnhoff’s production, which had its start at the ENO and then traveled the world, is evidently regarded as one of the great Wagner stagings of recent years, albeit not by absolutely everyone; during this season I think we probably averaged about one reviewer who didn’t love it to every couple who did. And that’s fair: it’s fairly austere and a bit alienating (deliberately) and thus not to everyone’s tastes. Then again, what is? I certainly have no objection to seeing a super-pretty super-traditional Parsifal — actually I’d quite like to — but I found Lehnhoff’s production ultimately quite captivating. Not sure I quite fathomed all of…

Today at the Con, Italian composer Ezio Bosso spoke at a seminar for composition students. Readers of Limelight may recognise his name from Emma Kean’s March article on the Sydney Dance Company. Ezio has collaborated with choreographer Rafael Bonachela on LANDforms, a new work that will be premiered by the SDC later this month. Ezio spoke about the process of collaboration, as well as his approaches to finding inspiration for his compositions. One central message of his talk was that “we find ourselves through collaboration”. He urged us to never avoid collaborating – explaining that you will learn nothing if you confine yourself to your desk and your score. I wholeheartedly agree with Ezio’s sentiments. I recall that when I started telling friends about my decision to return to uni to study composition, I was occasionally asked whether a degree was really necessary to be a composer. And, while the answer is probably “no”, I had no doubt that immersing myself in a collaborative environment would be far more beneficial than reading scores, listening widely, and working in private. But, I digress. A former pupil of Phillip Glass, Ezio has worked in film as well as dance. He discussed one…

Elena used the lecture (which was the first in this year’s Alfred Hook Lecture Series at the Con) to share with us the various ways in which she uses events, objects and ideas to inspire her compositions. These inspirational sources vary greatly – perhaps best demonstrated in Elena’s newest piece Setting Out, which was premiered (also at the Con) on Sunday afternoon. The concerto for bassoon contains movements inspired by Elena’s experience catching public transport, and one based on the surname of artist Martin Sharp. I was most interested, and moved, to hear Elena explain the way she has used Schizophrenia as inspiration for her work. Elena’s son suffers from the disease and much of her work has been aimed at providing Alex with some respite from the internal voices with which he must constantly struggle. In order to do this, she transformed her musical style from that point on – abandoning avant-garde complexity in favour of harmonic simplicity (see Eliza Aria, below). While Elena didn’t spend a great deal of time discussing this very personal source of inspiration on Friday, some independent research led me to this interview from a few… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4…

I don’t know about you, but I always find it hard to resist the siren song of YouTube’s “Suggestions” column, that never-ending stream of related videos which ensures I can never just watch the clip I came for and leave — there’s always something else tempting to click on, something I haven’t heard of or need to see again. Hours pass, my bandwidth allowance taps me nervously on the shoulder, but I still have to watch just one more before wrenching myself away. This is what happened to me yesterday afternoon, when I went to dig out the link of a clip I’ve watched dozens of times, one of my very favourite moments of operatic humour — Beverly Sills’s appearance on the Muppet Show. What ensued was a veritable gala of opera through a Jim Henson filter, and now I feel the least I can do is share with you some of the highlights. This was the first revelation to me. An appearance on Sesame Street by bass-baritone Samuel Ramey, smack bang in his vocal prime, singing a Bizet-inspired paean to (what else?) the letter ‘L’. I love that he sings with as much commitment as if this were the…

There has been a pretty big gap between the writing of this and my previous post. Today I will try to explain why and, in the process, to discuss a recording of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Sydney Symphony. (Limelight editor) Francis Merson gave me the disc, knowing I’ve been struggling to formulate my thoughts. “The Adagio is the most famous part of the work,” he said. I nodded, as though I knew what that meant. Let’s just get it out of the way: I don’t know what “adagio” means. I wouldn’t know the difference between a cantata and a canon if the conductor – whose job, frankly doesn’t make much sense to me – and a contralto were holding hands with them on (in? during?) a cadenza. Should this be driving me crazy? I don’t know. Is it? Absolutely. I like to be right. I correct people who call the AK-47 a machine gun (it is an automatic rifle) and hold court on frozen conflicts in the post-Soviet sphere at the drop of a dime. I like to think it’s part of my charm but have been told it’s kind of annoying. I say this to…

There is a growing group of scientists who are convinced that technology will advance so far beyond our comprehension that the world as we know it will be completely transformed: they call this the “Singularity”. Ray Kurzweil, an American futurist and co-founder of Singularity University, has gone as far as to predict the year that these changes will take place: and it’s less than 35 years away. Kurzweil has observed that computational speed is growing exponentially. At the same time, the technology we are creating is getting “smarter”. So, the range of tasks that a computer can carry out faster than humans, and without their intervention, is growing. The expectation of Kurzweil and other Singularitarians is that, one day, those tasks will include the development of even smarter technology – computer programmers will be usurped by the very systems they have created. In other words: robots will learn to procreate (so to speak). They call this the “intelligence explosion”. OK, so the world will one day be ruled by super-intelligent robots. But, I hear you ask, what impact will this have on classical music? Even if the Singularitarians are right, and artificial intelligence… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

Searching for a birthday present for a tech-savvy sound engineer, and not wanting to come across as a Luddite, I stumbled upon a nifty CD. Well, not quite a CD: like much of the music we hear on ABC Classic FM, my purchase is housed in a jewel case, but the mechanism inside this flimsy, plastic, hinged container allows the music to exist, defines its sound world, and gives it life. American composer and artist Tristan Perich has programmed his First Symphony. It comes packaged in a CD case, the listener plugs headphones directly into the case, flicks the ‘on’ switch, adjusts the volume dial embedded in the case, and – hey, presto. A symphony. Perich’s 1-bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements, programmed onto a single microchip designed to ‘perform’ itself when switched on. His compositional techniques are electrical pulses and assembly code; the electronic circuit mounted in the jewel case is the composition. Electronic and electroacoustic music has experienced a long evolution in 20th-century classical music dating back to Varèse and the European avant-garde, but it’s never been presented in this form, as a sort of pocket sound installation. With digital downloads encroaching on physical CD…

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s operatic take on the rise and decline of Playmate, billionaire’s widow and tabloid darling Anna Nicole Smith has been heavily hyped by The Royal Opera, who commissioned it, pretty much from the day it was announced, and more intensely still in the weeks leading up to its world première. They’re even hyping it to those who’ve already bought tickets and shown up to see it – on Anna Nicole nights, promo shots of Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna Nicole smile at you from every portrait frame on the wall, every bust and statue, even from the spot above the stage where you expect to see the queen. Even the curtain is now hot pink instead of red. At some level it does please me to see an opera company get so desperately into the spirit of things but this is probably overkill, and it risks undermining the opera before it’s even begun to treat it as an Event in this way. Particularly if it’s an opera which sets out to move its audience as well as amuse them, which I think Anna Nicole does. At least, it gets all serious in the last half hour. Whether it is indeed…

After all the excitement of the Classic 100, the Classic 100 Ten Years On and the First Time Classics, I think it’s time for nominations for Music You Never Want To Hear Again, and I have a few ideas to get things started. 1. Anything by the composer Samuel Scheidt. Apart from having a most unfortunate name, this composer was forgotten for hundreds of years for a very good reason. He is boring. I played a Fantasia of his on ABC Classic FM a little while ago and it sounded like a piece of Monteverdi with all the grace and intelligence sucked out of it. So goodbye Scheidt, you had your chance and now it’s over. Same with the equally unfortunate Anton Ferdinand Titz. 2. The tradition of the singer holding the last high note in a Rossini aria. The music is powering along, we know we’re going to finish, we’re excited about it and suddenly the singer decides to stop and admire the view from a high B-flat. Rossini never intended it to be this way, it kills the drama and the excitement, and it should be banned immediately, or at least the singer should be fined $3,000 for…