There are about 20 kilometres between Melbourne’s Central Business District and Monash University. Luckily, my trek out to the Monash Performing Arts Centre (MPAC) to attend Swell, new music composed by Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, is coupled with a visit to an excellent, hitherto unexplored vintage shop near the uni.

That the performance of two of Hsieh’s compositions is also evocative thus becomes a happy bonus to the purchase of ‘new’ boots.

Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh. Portrait supplied

Hsieh is a Taiwanese-Australian composer working in acoustic and electroacoustic mediums. In 2020, when all was quiet with COVID, she was commissioned to write a piece for the Monash University International Women’s Day Composition Commission Prize.

That piece, titled