The Music of our Time
The Con’s flagship 101 Compositions for 100 Years program continues its celebrations with the Australian premiere of John Corigliano’s spectacular Circus Maximus. Fine Music speaks with the 'international marquee' composer and with Professor Kim Walker, Dean of The Sydney Conservatorium of Music, whose vision gave rise to the program.
Indulge in a fantasy. Imagine, for a moment, that it is 2008 and you are the Dean of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which will celebrate its centenary in 2015. What do you do?
Will you decide seven years is too far away to worry about and get on with more pressing matters? Or will you take the view that it’s never too early to start – and plan a huge concert for Wednesday 6 May 2015, 100 years to the day after the first concert? You could invite back all the famous musicians who studied at The Con and now play in the great orchestras of the world.
You might decide to mark the occasion by commissioning a new work from a major Australian composer as a world premiere for the centenary concert. You might also see the landmark as a fundraising opportunity, and, since all educational institutions are turning increasingly to their alumni for support, you might choose to set up a fund for Centenary Scholarships, to provide a more lasting commemoration.
But if you are Professor Kim Walker and have to make these decisions in reality, you will think of all of the above and then dream up a vastly more ambitious plan. Walker’s vision, seven years out from The Con’s centenary, was to commission not one, not a hundred, but 101 new musical works, some from the most celebrated living composers and some from composition students on the threshold of their careers.
No composer is allowed more than one commission; one of the criteria for selection is the likelihood of them having a real influence on the music of the next century. At least 85% must be Australian and in every year leading up to the centenary, the program features one international and one Australian ‘marquee’ composer, whose work is studied and performed extensively through the year. The marquee composers spend a week or two in residence at The Con, lecturing, giving masterclasses, getting to know students, faculty and audience members and generally becoming involved with the life of the institution.
The 101 commissioned works cover all musical genres – they range from a timpani solo to a full opera, and feature every instrument (and voice) taught at The Con. Once complete, the program will form a body of work with a life of its own, to be performed all over the world, and carrying the names of the 101 Compositions for 100 Years program and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music far and wide.
Walker was also keenly aware of the Centenary’s fundraising potential. She gathered a group of influential Australian music-lovers with connections in industry, commerce, finance, academia and the professions and challenged them to organise a major campaign. The goal – to increase The Con’s permanent endowment from around $30million to $100million (or even $101million!) No Australian arts philanthropy scheme has ever raised such a figure, but the Council members of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music Foundation (SCMF) believe it is possible, in the light of international benchmarking at peer institutions and the special affection and regard felt for The Con. Andrew Fairweather, SCMF Chair, says: ‘This could transform The Con’s future, putting it in a strong financial position for just about the first time ever!’
Walker is the first to admit that great plans are nothing without highly motivated, practical and effective collaborators: ‘I was so lucky to work with people who have helped to turn this wild dream into a growing reality: it would never have happened without the wholehearted commitment of Father Arthur Bridge and Matthew Hindson, who both supported it right from the start.’
Rev Dr Arthur Bridge AM, the founder and chairman of the community-based arts organisation, Ars Musica Australis, is patron of the 101 Compositions for 100 Years program. Associate Professor Matthew Hindson AM, himself a leading Australian composer, is Chair of the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts and Chair of Composition at The Con. Walker named a faculty task-force, chaired by Hindson, to nominate composers and review faculty suggestions.
The 101 program started spectacularly in August 2009, when the first international marquee composer came to Sydney. John Corigliano, winner of an Oscar, a Grawemeyer, three Grammy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, chose to write a new version for pierrot ensemble of his celebrated orchestral piece, Mr Tambourine Man, based on the lyrics (but not the music) of Bob Dylan. Corigliano said he had long wanted to re-cast the work and the 101 commission offered the perfect opportunity.
Corigliano is a huge admirer of both Dean Walker and the 101 program: ‘Every great society of the past is remembered by the art it leaves us. The unique project of commissioning 101 compositions is not only exciting for the audiences that will hear them, but also a way of leaving the vision of the Sydney Conservatorium to future generations.
It takes a great leader to make a great institution. Kim Walker’s artistic vision and leadership of the Sydney Conservatorium is magnificent. I am on the composition faculty of the Juilliard School in New York and I have visited almost every music conservatory in the United States. I can state with assurance that I have never met a greater leader or visionary in all my travels. She is the Sydney Conservatorium.’
Corigliano was struck by the energy and enthusiasm of the students and faculty members he worked with at The Con and said he would love to come back, especially if his loudest, largest and most unusual work, Circus Maximus, could ever be performed in one of his favourite cities. Walker took up the challenge and approached the organisers of Sydney City Council’s premier spring arts festival, Art & About, who jumped at the opportunity. Steve Williams will conduct the Conservatorium’s Wind Symphony and other musicians in two performances of Circus Maximus at Sydney Town Hall on Saturday 8 October, at 3pm and 7pm.
Circus Maximus is Corigliano’s third symphony. The first was for large symphony orchestra, the second for string orchestra alone and this is for wind, brass and percussion. For the audience, it is a unique experience, with musicians playing all around the auditorium. A concert band is on the stage, a marching band approaches from the main entrance and there are eleven trumpeters around the balcony, as well as a saxophone quartet, clarinet, horns, bass and percussion.
Corigliano says: ‘Circus Maximus is a parable of our time. Just as in ancient Rome, the Circus Maximus entertained people while civilisation around them started to fall, so, in our time, do our iPods, computers, TV, films and PlayStations distract us from the serious changes in the world around us. The technology that brought us all this entertainment also brought us a suitcase bomb that can level a city. So we turn to the thrilling technology of today to keep us from feeling the fear that this technology has made possible. Circus Maximus both celebrates and warns of the future. It’s great fun to hear, with its surround instruments, but it’s also chilling.’
The eight sections of the work are played without pause, from the strident fanfares of the opening (1) Introitus, through the seductive saxophones of (2) Screen/Siren to the fast-changing, constantly interrupting and demanding (3) Channel Surfing. The tranquillity of (4) Night Music I is a lyrical relief from the busy hubbub, with forest sounds and animal calls, but (5) Night Music II is quite different, featuring the hyperactive night-sounds of the cities, harsher and more extreme until it climaxes in (6) Circus Maximus, a frenzied, chaotic carnival of competing demands, a devastating critique of modern life. (7) Prayer answers the confusion with clearer sounds cutting through the cacophony, offering perhaps some hope for the future, leading into the unifying, closing (8) Coda: Veritas.
101 Compositions for 100 Years is itself a resounding statement of faith and belief in the value and significance of new music. Walker believes passionately that students about to become professional musicians should have high aspirations and contemporary goals, creating ever more refined interpretations of the new languages of music and sound: ‘Music mustn’t get trapped in a museum, where we just revere the past: it’s a living art-form, constantly changing and challenging our perceptions of its purpose, whether ancient or new. That’s what’s exciting about it.’
‘Our beloved Sydney Con has been encouraging a love and appreciation of fine music in the people of NSW for nearly 100 years. We have no idea who our successors will be, a century from now, but I want to leave them a time-capsule of the music of our time, our creativity. I want to tell them we enjoyed the great music of the past, of course, yet we sang our own songs as well.’
The Australian marquee composers who have already been featured in the 101 program are Carl Vine, Peter Sculthorpe and Elena Kats-Chernin. In the years to come, the plan is that they will be followed by Ross Edwards, Brett Dean and Richard Mills, whose 101 composition will be an opera about the Anzacs – a particularly appropriate work to close the program, since The Con was founded by the NSW Government within days of the Gallipoli landings.