Here and Now

Here and Now is a snapshot of the artistic process, taken from a particular time and place; musicians based in Brisbane, Australia in 2013-14.

As Vanessa Tomlinson writes, “It is not a singular story, but an entry point into the multiple ways we can approach the making of music … What is in common here is the dedication to sound and music as a way of interacting with the world – providing windows of deeply considered process, transformation, interaction, isolation and collaboration.

The Listening Museum took place on April 20, 2013, in the factory of Urban Art Projects. The Listening Museum was inspired by the machinery, the site, and the promise of a bronze pouring.

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Warren Burt, in Australia, composer, professor, writes, “What I get from these articles is a sense of social engagement. For all of them, music-making is an interactive form of sound making that involves curators, composers, performers and audiences. Far from the myth of the detached performer or composer, the image presented here is one of engaged people creating work with a deep knowledge of the context they are creating in.”

Vanessa Tomlinson

Stephen Emmerson performing Beethoven in Singapore

Stephen Emmerson performing Bach

Stephen Emmerson

Kim Cunio

Zameen

Toby Wren

Authors and artists explain what they’re doing …

Vanessa Tomlinson, Professor at Griffith University, Deputy Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre, PhD at the University of San Diego, California, describes The Listening Museum as “a 2-hour site-specific investigation of sound in a multi-layered participatory journey through space and time …”

Danielle Bentley, PhD, cellist, director of the ensemble Collusion, writes “Imagine a music festival as an immersive artwork: A creatively constructed exploration of musical terrains, multisensorial and liminal experiences … audience and artists play equal roles on the same plane …”

Stephen Emmerson, pianist, faculty at Queensland Conservatorium, writes “On 28 October 2012, I had the opportunity to perform Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in Singapore with the Orchestra of the Music Makers conducted by my colleague Tze Law Chan from the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory within the National University of Singapore. Here is my cadenza for the first movement …”

Erik Griswold, composer, pianist, research fellow at Queensland Conservatorium, writes that “A prepared piano is a piano (usually grand) altered by placing objects and materials between and on the strings. Screws and bolts are placed snugly between adjacent strings to lower the pitch, produce rich unusual harmonics, and introduce percussive and buzzing effects. Rubber and wood can be wedged or laced between strings to mute the tone, shorten the sustain, dampen the higher harmonics, and create a percussive attack. Paper and cardboard can also be used to affect the attack characteristics and produce unpredictable buzzing effects …”

Jessica Aszodi, performer, researcher, has sung in festivals around the world. In her words, “for two months in 2013, I was a fellow of the Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts, USA, where I performed in a number of projects, among them the premiere of Robert Honstein’s We Choose to Go to the Moon, an original composition for John F Kennedy’s 1962 speech in which he outlined the US space program. That new work was paired with Destination Moon, a pop tune from 1951. Honstein prepared an arrangement of the song, influenced by Dinah Washington’s 1963 recording.”

Stephen Emmerson, on re-imagining Bach’s Goldberg Variations, writes, “Though the project has been unfolding for several years, I expect it will continue to develop well into the future. I did perform a program of two pianos with Sonya Lifschitz for the Four Winds Festival April 2012, and it happened to be on Easter Sunday when we liked to play some Bach … Arranging the Goldberg Variations was among the most personally rewarding projects I have done.”

Louise Denson, performer, composer, Senior Lecturer in Jazz at the Queensland Conservatorium, writes “Honeyeaters, lorikeets and figbirds shelter among the leaves, chattering among themselves and shrieking hysterically if dogs sniff their way too near … The coalescence of time, space, contemplation and habit that I experience every time I go for a walk, creates the music in my life. All I have to do is hurry home and write it down.”

Kim Cunio, composer, has presented his music at the White House, United Nations, and around the world. He writes, “I joined the Queensland Conservatorium in mid 2009 with an understanding that music making would be my primary mode of research. Many staff in Australian music universities make music, primarily giving concerts and presenting newly composed works. A growing number have also entered into a process of artistic experimentation …”

Leah Barclay, in Sounding Zameen, writes that “Zameen is a Hindi word meaning ‘land’. It is a word that has become synonymous with the damming of the Narmada River in North India. To date over 30 million people have been internally displaced and the resulting Indigenous activist movement has become one of the most successful and sophisticated in contemporary history. Within The DAM(N) Project, Zameen is an immersive performance drawing on environmental field recordings, triptych visuals and contemporary dance that pulls the audience into the heart of a remote Indian community fighting for their way of life …”

Narmada Prelude

Toby Wren, composer, guitarist, is a performer in intercultural contexts based on his ongoing collaborations with master musicians of the Carnatic tradition. As a Senior Lecturer at SAE Creative Media Institute, where he teaches Critical Thinking, Media, and Cultural Studies, he lectures on jazz guitar at the Queensland Conservatorium. He points out, “Rich and Famous is a composition, improvisation, and performance project that fuses elements of Carnatic music (South Indian classical) with contemporary jazz harmony and instrumentation … In the seven years leading up to Rich and Famous I undertook intensive studies of Carnatic music, especially rhythm, and collaborated with Carnatic musicians both in Brisbane, Australia, and Chennai, India …

Rich and Famous

And after a long period of compositional dormancy, this piece emerged seemingly without conscious effort. There was no consideration of how to integrate Carnatic and jazz concepts: when I wrote the piece they were simply there, techniques that I knew how to use …”

Flood Lines