My piece Fast Blue Village has had a fairly long life. It has been played by a string orchestra before, but I have completely revamped the ending, so this version for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra is new.

The piece itself started out as an 18-minute chamber music work for 15 instruments called Village Idiot.

Elena Kats-Chernin. Photo © Jacintha Nolte

The story of its creation goes like this: in 2006, I was at the launch of an exhibition dedicated to artists with schizophrenia at the Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith, NSW. At that event, I heard Graeme Doyle, a visual artist and poet, recite his poem Village Idiot. He talked about how he felt like a village idiot among the so-called ‘normal’ people, and how it is a label you get. This beautiful poem resonated with me, because I have someone in the family with that illness. I felt compelled to write a work inspired by Doyle’s poem.

In that original piece, which premiered in Milwaukee in the US, an electric guitar played the role of the village idiot.

After the...