Music, She Wrote, Concert 3: Croissants and Whiskey
March 31, 2023, ALPHA60, Melbourne
On a dreary, cold, rainy Friday night on Flinders Lane at Chapter House, a concert of contemporary chamber music was standing room only. How?
It’s delightfully uncomplicated; put an audience in a nice, relaxed and beautiful space appropriate for chamber music, offer them a glass of wine, put them close up to the music and remove the burden of traditional concert formalities. Combine that with compelling artistic direction, and the question becomes; why isn’t it just like this all the time?
It’s an enormous credit to both 3MBS and Katie Yap that this independent collaboration has opened up a wonderful new venue and partnership with Alpha60 for this year’s festival, and that over the course of 3 years Music, She Wrote has very quickly become one of our most clearly artistically identifiable festivals in the concert calendar.
Katie Yap’s artistic direction of this festival was wonderfully deft, giving performers the license to present the work that is clearly important to them, and that gave a feeling of authenticity that is so critical to a festival like this. That the overall festival program featured so many works by Melbourne composers and by composers rarely if ever performed in Australia was a further nod to this spirit of curiosity in its artistic direction and a big part of why it was so engaging.
This evenings program of McCooey, Trewartha, Chance, Yap and Younan was almost entirely written in the last 2 years, featuring 7 works and 2 world premieres.
The evening opened with a set by Ceridwen McCooey, performing her own works for cello with live pedal looping. The opening two works from 2022 A starless, fatherless sky and When you are ready for words reflected two distinct frames of mind; the first nihilistic, the second filled with peace and hope. These pieces both followed similar trajectories, effectively setting up an atmosphere using textures and harmonic relationships with the pedal over which McCooey would seemingly improvise melodic material with a contemplation of the atmosphere created.
McCooey’s new work on the program The witch he loved, written with this festival in mind and premiered tonight, was an imaginative retelling of the story of Lilith, who in Mesopotamian and Judaic mythology is considered the first independent woman, cited as having been Adam’s first wife before being banished from the Garden of Eden for not complying with Adam’s demands.
This work was a substantive, narrative led work over 7 movements and for me was the clear musical highlight of the evening. Underneath what felt a very free ad lib performance, it’s clear McCooey has a great and thoughtful compositional craft underpinning her work. This piece avoided all the traps of stasis and meandering one might associate with loop pedal works in the wrong hands; each movement had clever ideas and intrinsically interesting looped material, and despite being the longest work on the whole program felt incredibly concise. It was poignant and compelling storytelling and from a performer still at the very beginning of her career and it’ll be interesting to observe the evolution of her artistic practice in the years to come.
Croissants and Whiskey were the closing act of the festival…
…featuring artistic director Katie Yap as composer and baroque viola player, with harpsichordist Joy Lee, recorder player Ryan Williams and on G violone, Miranda Hill.
The obvious challenge for an ensemble of this type is finding repertoire; there’s hardly anything even from the baroque era! Where usually one might expect a group like this to arrange a lot of existing work (and they might still), thankfully they’ve commissioned a lot already in their first few years, acting as a great starting point for reimagining these instruments and what they might do. Louisa Trewartha’s work demonstrated the possibilities of this combination in a more individualised and gestural way, convincingly drawing out the characteristic oddness of the instrumentation and using it to advantage, making it a compelling listen, particularly in the first movement of her Baroque Quartet. It’s clear Croissants and Whiskey take a lot of joy in collaborating together, and as an ensemble they seemed most at ease when leaning into to more characteristic band roles of continuo, bass and viola/recorder as melodic instruments as was the case in Katie Yap’s folk influenced works, August/Multitudes. These 2 tunes, whilst varied and dynamically arranged and treated, had a charming ease, as though invitations for dialogue and dance. Similarly, when conventionally set, Elizabeth Younan’s use of the ensemble in the opening Belly Dance of her work The Fertile Crescent, really allowed the ensemble to take flight and made for a fun end to a great night.
Perhaps the only downside to the wide range of composers on offer in the second half was that we were offered a series shorter works rather without a more substantial singular work, in which the contrast to the McCooey raised another provocation about the entire program and the very purpose of the festival itself; to raise the profile of and celebrate the work of female composers. Whilst Croissants & Whiskey are out here fighting the good fight, how do we expect to reach equality in general programming when the overwhelming majority of programmed music by female identifying composers is contemporary, and the contemporary commissioning practice is increasingly for smaller works of 6-8 minutes? We want diversity amongst our artistic voices, so how does that constraint impact the depth of contemporary story telling? And are we limiting the ways we tell contemporary stories by commissioning based on duration? Would Mahler or Feldman survive the TikTok era? Just some of the questions left from a richly engaging festival, I look forward to seeing what Music, She Wrote becomes next year under Katie’s stewardship.
Guest reviewer: Matt Laing
Matt Laing is a viola player and composer from Melbourne. He plays regularly with the major orchestras in Melbourne, and has written for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra and the Australian String Quartet and amongst others.
Photography: Annie Harvey
