Since I moved to Canberra for university, I’ve been working at the Canberra International Music Festival (CIMF). I started as an intern and moved my way up to now, this year, becoming production manager. It’s a job I really enjoy, and I find it so fulfilling to help make this music happen. It’s a festival focused on art music (classical and new experimental music) and it takes place all over Canberra: this year we have a day in the High Court, and one year we were inside Parliament House! There’s a lot of events, and I find people my age often don’t have the time, money, or art music know-how to decide what to go to. So in this post, I thought I’d break down some interesting concerts and provide reasons for why they should be musically interesting. Let’s get started!

Mosso: Music In Motion

Alright, this first pick is one which I find super exciting. Mosso is a mini-festival taking place on Saturday 3 May all within the wonderful National Film and Sound Archive. There’s a mix of ticketed and non-ticketed (i.e. FREE) events there, all of which are genuinely interesting. Being at the film and sound archive, many of the events have a film component to them, but are accompanied by live music and/or cool surround sound using the cinema sound systems. I don’t think you can go wrong with anything here, and the vibes are sure to be immaculate. If you can’t decide on anything, I recommend going even for the free concerts, and you can hopefully buy tickets on the day if you hear of something interesting that piques your fancy. The idea is you can go for the entire day, as something is always on throughout the entirety of it. If you really need a suggestion, I think you can’t go wrong with flautist Sally Walker and Lyle Chan’s Living Poems of the Sea, which explores dolphins and whales through music and image.

For more information and to buy tickets for this event, click here.

Magic Realism

This is sure to be a really exciting show at the Street Theatre on Thursday 1 May and Friday 2 May. The first half is a work by Hildegard von Bingen, who is commonly referred to as a “chad” in the classical music space. She was one of the most significant composers in medieval times, writing single-line works in what is called a Gregorian Chant style (you often hear this in movies when a character visits a cathedral, probably because its quite simple in character and doesn’t detract from the scene, whereas the complex harmonies of later music might). This has been reimagined by composer and violinist Erkki Veltheim to be performed by Jane Sheldon – don’t miss it!

The second half is even more exciting, as it’s the east coast premiere of Mungangga Garlagula, also by Veltheim and Mark Atkins, one of Australia’s foremost yidaki (didgeridoo) players. Join Mark Atkins by the fire as he takes you on a journey across musical borders, with a focus on deep listening. Something that I grapple with a lot in my own research is the reclaiming of Western performance spaces by Indigenous groups, and I think Mungangga Garlagula could be a really great example of a way to do this: see how Indigenous yarning and contemporary music come together in a theatrical space.

For more information and tickets for this event, please click here.

8 Pipers for Philip Glass

Once upon a time, my ex-girlfriend and I sat down to watch a movie. She chose a romcom called No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart. I went along with it, because I’d never seen it before, but I really enjoyed the opening music, and I enjoyed it even more when I saw the “music by Philip Glass” credit appear. After that point, every time a part of the score came on that I liked I giggled to myself “OMG Philip Glass” like a girl at a Harry Styles concert. Philip Glass is just that good. He also wrote the music for The Truman Show, and Truman Sleeps from that score is a fundamental part of my musical identity.

Outside his film work, his art music work is phenomenal. Glass is a “minimalist” which is a style of music where small parts are repeated over and over, gradually changing over time. It’s a very different style to the bombastic romantic and post-romantic styles that developed in the 1800s and beyond (and which still dominates film music to a large degree; think of your Star Warses and MCU movies). That music revolves around themes and harmonic complexity; minimalism revolves around small “cells” of a few notes and the complexity comes from how these cells interact with each other and slowly change over the course of a work. You can hear this in Truman Sleeps, even in the short (1:41) movie version, where slight changes to the end of a phrase completely alter the sound and meaning.

This concert has Metamorphosis to open, performed by Sonya Lifschitz who is an incredible pianist. The piece is based on the Kafka novella of the same name, so you can load up on intertextuality in the first half. The second half is going to be really special, however. 8 bagpipers from the Brittany region of France will perform a collection of Glass’s pieces for bagpipes, which is something that I think cannot be missed. Now, I think a lot of people see bagpipes and get scared off: keep in mind these are French bagpipes, and that the style is not necessarily the full pelt that you get with Scottish ones. There is something special about seeing minimalism played on wind instruments: most of the famous pieces are for piano, or guitar, or instruments where you don’t need to worry about breathing and so you can just play over and over. Where pieces are for wind instruments, there’s usually a big orchestra to cover any gaps in breathing. 8 pipers is a pretty small number in the scheme of things, and on top of that, I can tell you that they also play with the staging and performance venue in new ways, so it won’t be like any other concert you’ve been too. I think this will be quite a transcendent experience, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough.

For more information and to buy tickets, click here.

Of course, there’s many other shows that I think are interesting and worth looking at. Five Short Blasts involves hopping on a pre-planned boat-ride with a few other people and going out onto the lake and witnessing music in place and related to that place. The opening and closing concerts are always special too, and there’s some pieces littered throughout related to the overall theme of liberté, freedom in an age filled with ideological and political divides. You can see the full program here.

I’ll be working throughout the whole festival, so if you come to concert, feel free to say hi! I’ll probably be running around madly but I will always take the time to speak to friends and guests.

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