Ensemble Mania is a new music group based between two cities. Much like its director, composer Dominic Flynn, the collective was born in Hobart and expanded (with a “cross-Bass Strait connection”) to Melbourne. Throughout the year, it flies between the two cities to present programs centred on Australian works.

“Ensemble Mania started out of the dregs of a bunch of different musical things that were happening in nipaluna/Hobart – composers who weren’t getting their music played down there, musicians who wanted to play new music but didn’t know any composers, ensembles that were looking for each other,” Flynn tells Limelight.

Dominic Flynn. Photo © Saxon Hornett

“We were really trying to focus on new local music or stuff from the past that had never been played or that had been played only once, which is a very typical composer story – something gets a premiere and then it goes in the drawer forever. Our first concert featured works by Don Kay, a Tasmanian composer who’s 93 now; this was a portrait concert with music he wrote while studying with Malcolm Williamson in London. That kickstarted our interest in digging up older music.”

Like its heritage, Ensemble Mania’s ethos is two-pronged – platforming new Aussie music and unearthing older repertoire. The latter involves a lot of “trawling libraries and archives” to find underperformed gems. One of the ensemble’s “larger arcs” looks at the music of composer Hellgart Mahler, the late great-niece of Gustav Mahler who settled in Tasmania in the ’50s.

“She was based in Devonport, and we focused on trying to platform as much as possible while she was still alive. She was so isolated in the north of Tassie, she didn’t get the platform that she deserved; we were really trying to find this older music and give it a longer life than it might have had otherwise.”

Ensemble Mania. Photo supplied

Ensemble Mania’s upcoming program on 5 September, Pickett, is an all-Australian program featuring world-premiere works by Aditya Ryan Bhat, Jaslyn Robertson and David William Murray.

Flynn is the 2025 Continuo Commission composer; Pickett is his resulting work, which also receives its world premiere on the program it lends its title to. The work is a reflection on the intersection between Australian music and colonisation; Pickett is the maiden name of Flynn’s maternal grandmother, a name given to his Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors by English colonisers. It is dedicated to the Picketts and his late father.

“Australian composition offers such an interesting and unique perspective: writing music in what’s essentially a very recently transplanted tradition from Europe, while so geographically removed from where this music originated. I think that’s given a lot of Australian composers an interesting viewpoint from which to explore, and it’s something I’m interested in exploring as well,” he says.

“Especially with this disparate nature of my ancestry. How I, as someone with these varying lineages, fit into the world of Australian music? What do I want to do with my music? What things do I want to cultivate, and what other aspects, problematic aspects, do I want to sort of, um, critically analyse? Place is so central to that; Tasmania is so central to that.”

Pickett takes a look at a work by composer-pianist Maria Logan, who was born in Dublin in 1808 and emigrated to Tasmania in 1835. In the following year, she transcribed a traditional Palawa song and composed her own simple piano accompaniment for it, titling it Song of the Aborigines of Van Diemen’s Land.

“I’ve been sitting with it for quite a while, and it’s such a complicated work to dig into,” explains Flynn.

“I think what I’m interested in is the work’s failure to preserve the original Palawa song she would’ve heard. Through transcribing it into Western notation in the first place, it’s forced to adhere to Western language and hierarchies, but it also fails to sort of somehow Anglicise the work; it compromises on both counts. It just sort of doesn’t function as a successful piece of music.”

The title page of Maria Logan’s score. Photo supplied

Flynn notes that the melody Logan uses is very similar – if not the same – to a song performed by Palawa cultural leader Fanny Cochrane Smith that was recorded on wax cylinders at the turn of the 20th century, more than 60 years after Logan’s transcription.

“The tradition that Fanny is singing in is rhythmically freer than what Maria was able to capture through her notation. Western notation is quite good at some very specific things and in other things, it’s lacking in accuracy,” Flynn notes.

“Maria locked it into the grid, so it follows a structure and melodic line more recognisable to her. The accompaniment is the most blatantly transformative thing about it; it’s so pastoral and English; she’s bringing all this baggage from her musical education overseas. She’s trying to make Western tonal sense of this song.”

Logan’s “extreme transformation” of material begets Flynn’s own piece of musical extremes. With a gap of 190 years between the two, Pickett tries to draw “as much sonic material as possible” from Logan’s work. As a starting point, he asked pianist friends to record Logan’s piano introduction and Flynn’s own transcription of the work on their instruments – various recording devices, various degrees of tuning, various results.

He then ran it through a process he “sort of stole” from Canadian-born, London-based composer Cassandra Miller; what she calls ‘computer listening’: converting an audio recording into MIDI, and then MIDI into notation.

“It spits out these ludicrously detailed scores as the MIDI software picks up on extramusical sounds in the recording, and tries to notate all of the harmonics of a note,” Flynn explains.

Among these dense walls of sounds (popular songs converted into MIDI made for viral trends years ago), a ghostly imprint of the original tune remains.

“You might be able to pick out [Logan’s] harmony, but it’s surrounded by these big swaths of dissonance which it struggles to peek out of. It’s definitely something that the MIDI helps steer me in the direction of.”

Ensemble Mania’s Sophie Marcheff. Photo supplied

In Pickett, he also tests out the extremes of his instruments and notation. The work asks its flautist and saxophonist to constantly shift how much breath they use for each tone, and calls on its instruments to play outside of their comfortable range. One section uses a lot of glissandi as a way to “destabilise this idea of pitches on a linear, segmented grid”; probing at a weak point of Western notation.

“I’m really interested in various systems and finding where they fail, or where they stop functioning in the way that they were designed to. In notation, this could mean layering tuplets over the base grid until the player is sort of forced to come at it from a different angle. In terms of instruments, it’s finding ways to push them a little bit outside of their normative function.”

Throughout Pickett, this ripe tension between consonance and dissonance, flow and hesitation, becomes an interesting mirror to culture and history.

“I really want to explore that dichotomy, that weird tension between, say, English church music, which is the tradition that Maria Logan has come from, with these lovely chords, but the cultural context in which she’s writing it is anything but simple,” Flynn explains.

“As music practitioners nowadays, looking back on this music, to give history the justice it deserves, is to look at how complicated it is and not shy away from the discomfort of a lot of it. Especially someone with these disparate ancestries. I wanted to lean into how complex the history was in which this relatively simple music has been made – sonically simple but, culturally, extremely complex. That’s something I’m taking and making audible.”

Ensemble Mania presents Pickett on 5 September at the Meat Market Stables, Melbourne. More information can be found here.