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Young composers, their work and ideas
by Paul Stanhope Writing a ‘who’s who’ of young Australian composers is virtually an impossible task, such is the depth and magnitude of compositional activity in this country. A healthy sign, but in writing an article such as this, one will inevitably leave people out just because of the sheer numbers involved. So let me begin with this disclaimer. My particular ‘who’s who’ is subject to the limit of being 30 or under: an age when most athletes are past their prime, but when composers are often just beginning to hit their stride. I never claim this article to be more than a personal perspective, and although it is warped because of my particular geographical position (i.e. Sydney) I have at least attempted to gauge what is happening elsewhere through various contacts (ah, yes, I have had my spies out of late!).
So I shall begin in Sydney which has the biggest and in some ways the most competitive new music scene. I shall also start with one of the most successful young composers in Australia at this moment, namely Matthew Hindson, who will turn 34 this year. By what criteria do I make such a claim? It would be tempting to say purely by the number of high-profile opportunities Hindson has attained: a number of major performance opportunities with the ABC orchestras, commissions from some of Australia’s foremost ensembles, and the kind of publicity many senior composers have never seen. In 1997, Hindson’s orchestral work, Homage to Metallica, made national television and radio news headlines. As you can gather from this particular title, Hindson is fascinated by popular music and culture, ranging from Elvis Presley and Death Metal through to his more recent obsession with the driving forces of Techno. In 1997, the Tasmanian Symphony orchestra commissioned and performed a new work Speed which was staged with a hint of almost sheepish embarrassment. When the young audience exploded into uproars of applause, the powers that be realised the potential of this compositional voice, and recorded a CD single of the work. Although Hindson has had some extraordinary opportunities, these have been achieved through the application of an accomplished and assured technique and a freshness of ear that has excited many listeners around the country.
Hindson’s classmate at the University of Sydney, Elliott Gyger, is also no slouch. He is an extremely accomplished composer of an unusually large body of works, which are of a greatly different ilk to Hindson’s. Gyger brings consummate musicianship to his composition craft, but is more cerebral in his approach, almost in a kind of retrospective way, The Hawaii-Five-O tunes and thumping dance rhythms of Hindson’s work couldn’t be further away from Gyger’s advance, poetic, fluid filigree. Gyger is currently studying toward a Ph.D. at Harvard University.
A few years younger are a pair of composers who are bound to make their mark on Australian composition. Matthew Shlomowitz and Damien Ricketson, former students of Sydney Conservatorium, are similarly distant in their stylistic divisions. Ricketson’s work has been influenced by hard-edged minimalist textures of Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and Australia’s Michael Smetanin, and he has recently returned form a period of two years study in the Netherlands with Andriessen and other Dutch gurus. From recent works I have heard by this composer, he is bound to make a major impact on the Australian composition scene. This is a talent not to be squandered, and one can hope that enough far-sighted music organisations support him with the opportunities he so clearly deserves.
His mate, Matthew Shlomowitz, meanwhile is just about to head abroad for study with California-based Brian Ferneyhough: one of the more notorious composers alive today. Schlomowitz’s work follows the line of the international avant-garde to its evolutionary pinnacle. It is difficult music to get around for audiences and performers alike, but Shlomowitz pursues his ideals with great vigour. The only other young composer I can think of who has pursued this particular avenue with such passion is Melbourne-based Adam Yee, who won the Nestlé Big Break a few years back, although Newt Armstrong and Scott McIntyre (also from Melbourne) have also trodden this more difficult path.
In general terms, it is tempting to say that young Melbourne composers adopt a more cerebral ‘notey’ approach, in line with the traditions of the European avant-garde. But one only has to think of composers such as Andree Greenwell, David Young, Stuart Greenbaum and Tim Davies as complete exceptions to the rule. Greenwell’s recent orchestral piece Go is an impressive work which seems to follow the line of hyperactivity found in American composer John Adams’ Chamber Symphony and one that seems to have shaken the more cerebral shackles of the avant-garde without sacrificing any of its depth. Greenbaum, meanwhile, was once described by a critic as the “King of Easy-listening contemporary music”: the sort of comment that dismisses his attractive surface material with the academic aloofness that has turned so many listeners away from new music. In Greenbaum’s work jazz, pop and minimalism are all rolled into tightly conceived classical forms. Greenbaum has been active for many years as a composer for the Melbourne Theatre Company and is prolific in his output.
Tim Davies’ music shares Greenbaum’s charm, and although it would be tempting to say that his is a Melbournian quality, Davies originally hails from the more sub-tropical climes of Brisbane, where there is a very active community of young composers. Brisbane’s population has grown remarkably in the last ten years and, according to Robert Davidson (composers and double bassist extraordinaire) its cultural sophistication is surging ahead in leaps and bounds. Brisbane supports a small but active new music community, which has such groups as elision, Topology, Two Complete Lunatics and Perihelion: all top-notch ensembles with very different sensibilities. A recent trend amongst young Brisbane composers I have noticed has been a return to ideas of experimentalism, long thought abandoned in the wake of a dissolving avant-garde in much of the rest of the world. Although there might be something slightly ‘retro’ with this movement, there are many stones left unturned in the wake of the whirlwind era of experimentation by composers in the 1950s and 60s. It will be fascinating to see what comes of this in a decade or so.
Amongst this group, Damian Barbeler (recently moved to Sydney) and Luke Jaaniste seem to be doing some thought-provoking work. Jaaniste, still very young and in his third year at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, has written a number of monolithic works, where musical elements are stripped back in order to explore particular concepts of pitch, timbre and time. Although these pieces are not always gripping for an audience, it is hoped Jaaniste’s curiosity will flower into a more expansive kind of music with the very original ear he seems to bring to his pieces. Barbeler’s work, on the other hand, can seem positively extrovert by comparison. Elements of grunge, virtuosity, timbral exploration and theatricality are infused in his most successful pieces: Idiomanic, a chamber piece where each of the players play as fast as possible in a breathless race of virtuosity and Wailing, a screaming tour de force of a vocal piece not for the faint-hearted (or voiced). Also notable from this group of composers is Toby Wren, whose well-crafted work won him a commission for the 1999 Darwin International Guitar Festival.
Also currently a Brisbane resident, Dominik Karski was recently awarded the 1998 ABC Classic FM Young Composer Award. The winning piece Floating on a River of Time was recorded by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra 20C ensemble and will be released on CD by ABC Classics. Karski’s music invokes an extreme sensitivity for carefully constructed forms and delicate timbral and textural shifts. Karske originally studied with Brian Howard in Western Australia before moving to Brisbane to continue his studies with Stephen Cronin. Dominik is a very disciplined composer, who brings something of an east European flavour to his music (his background is Polish) and is fascinated by orchestral writing, and also by the harp. Western Australia has its fair share of compositional talent, with David Morgan who, at only 22, has recently completed a commission by the WA Ballet for a dance score: a major opportunity for any composer, let alone one so young. Morgan is a precocious talent and will go far. Of similar precociousness is Iain Graindage, who is active as a cellist of considerable skill as well as a composer. Graindage has secured himself excellent opportunities composing music for theatre as well as for the concert hall. Roxanne Della-Bosca, a student of Roger Smalley, who was also a finalist in the Classic FM Young Composer Award, displays an awareness in her work of the unique climes and energies of landscape in the West, and is one to watch out for.
It seems hardly necessary to point out women composers nowadays, since there are many very successful ones in Australia, and particularly in the under-30s generation. In the Classic FM Young Composer’s Award, half the finalists were female. Apart from Della-Bosca, there was Kirsty Beilharz from Sydney and Kate Neal from Melbourne. Dr. Beilharz keeps going from strength to strength, having recently been awarded the Sir Charles Mackerras Scholarship for further study in the UK and Europe, which has followed up a Churchill Fellowship in 1996 and 1997 and selection to the Gaudeamus contest in Amsterdam in 1995. Kate Neal, meanwhile, brings an originality to her work through her involvement as a performer in improvised and early music activities. Another prize-winner, Jane Stanley, who is currently studying with Peter Sculthorpe, was co-awarded the 2MBS-FM Young Composer Award in 1997, and brings something of the timbral sensitivity of Anne Boyd’s music to her largely understated and meditative pieces.
Choral music seems to be another area where young composers are very active. Sydney-based Matthew Orlovich, for example, has almost entirely speialised in the composition of choral music which is particularly singer-friendly. Kathryn Reeves and Jacqueline Athertone of Brisbane bring a similar sensitivity to their choral work, as they are both members of the Australian Voices choir, presently run by Stephen Leek who is perhaps Australia’s best-know choral composer.
Back in Sydney, Drew Crawford floats somewhere between two worlds, writing for popular cabaret shows and also more so-called serious concert works. The influence of popular culture is all-pervasive in Crawford’s work, but not always in an overt sense. For example, his new string quartet, composed in memory of Jeff Buckley, takes as much from Sculthorpe’s Mangrove in its textural sympathies as it does from the pop music world. As something of an Australian Kurt Weill (or, at least, potentially so) Crawford is somewhat caught between the world of pop (as in his music theatre work Why Are All Our Porn-Stars Killing Themselves) and concert music. Like Weill, we seem to find him difficult to pigeon-hole, which seems to underline a lack of flexibility in the new music world, rather than any particular fault by Crawford himself, who is an important talent and ought to be recognised as such.
The influence of composition teachers is demonstrable in the types of composers coming out of various institutions. (We set aside here the unique perspective of those who bypass tertiary ‘serious’ music study altogether.) For example, in Brisbane, composers coming out of the Conservatorium are generally influenced by the more experimental pathways of their teachers Stephen Cronin and Gerard Brophy whereas those from the University of Queensland follow a more conservative outlook. These sorts of trends can be observed all over Australia, but interestingly enough, in Adelaide where Graeme Koehne (the composer of ABC- and Musica Viva-friendly works like Powerhouse) is the University’s composition mentor, the work of the students tends to be much more focussed upon the activities of performing groups such as ACME. Koehne’s very accessible, listener-friendly music is not necessarily seen as the was forward for younger composers such as Jeremy Rowney and Nigel Maunder. Here the tight-knit new music community is very much interested in experimenting with sound itself, both in acoustic and electronic media. Matthew Thomas, who has a background in engineering, is, for example, producing some fascinating electronic music and has recently produced his own CD; here a fascination with the building blocks of sound may be observed. In the early 1980s, the composition scene in Adelaide was very much dominated by Richard Meale and Tristram Cary, who both worked at the University of Adelaide. When Raymond Chapman-Smith arrived on the scene, he challenged their dominance by working independently from the University structure. His interest in minimalism encouraged a new wave of composers including John Polglase, David Kotlowy and David Harris, the current movers and shakers of the Adelaide new music scene, to re-examine the nature and construction of sound through time. In turn, this group of composers has influenced a whole new wave of composers who form the very active and Healthy Adelaide scene. Championed by such figures as Stephen Whittington, a lecturer at the University of Adelaide who is always interest in new directions in music, it would not be surprising to find South Australia producing a compositional voice in the coming years which is truly unique and exciting.
Upon talking to a number of younger composers (as one does over a couple of lemonades after concerts or rehearsals) I am struck not by the diversity and range of opinions and approached to composed music—this fact seems to be an accepted reality and a great sign of the tolerance of a diversity of ideas in Australia—but by the overwhelming sense of generational identity. Time and time again it seems to me that the under-30s are chanting the slogan “stuff the baby-boomers” who have the cultural hegemony in Australia. It reminds me of Mark Davis’s book Gangland which argues that ‘Generation X’ is tired of the ideas that the cultural elites, invested in the generation of the baby-boomers, have produced. This may be no more than healthy, youthful disdain and rebellion, but this underlying dissatisfaction with the Baby-boomers may well see something of an interesting musical sea-change to which we can all look forward. It is perhaps Matthew Hindson’s piece Speed which is most representative of this sea-change, breaking the rules of what is considered as acceptable in ‘serious’ music. One can only hope that influential bodies such as Symphony Australia and ABC Classic FM will continue to show foresight in taking risks as they did with Speed in order to usher in this sea-change.
Paul Stanhope is a composer and was a finalist in the ABC Classic FM Young Composer Award. He lectures part time at the University of Sydney and is musical director for the contemporary music ensemble Coruscations.
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