Southbank Brass Ensemble
Melbourne International Festival of Brass
October 2, 12:00pm – 1:00pm
South Melbourne Town Hall
Last Friday the Southbank Brass Ensemble again performed my piece ‘Burning Water’ this time as part of the Melbourne International Festival of Brass, and they again did a great job. Thanks to Russell Davis for conducting and for including it on the program, and thanks to the players of the ensemble for all their hard work, and thanks to the festival organisers.
A quick bit of background on this event: earlier this year the Institute of Italian Culture and the VCAM school of Music held a series of workshops hosted by Carlo Forlivesi as part of the composition competition “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, for which all the participants selected a poem by an Italian poet from a list provided, and composed a work inspired by the text. The intention of the competition was to celebrate the Italian language, as well as mark the centenary of the founding of the Italian Futurist movement. Following the workshops three finalists were selected from the participants, Chiaki Kato, Mike Solomon and myself, and the ensemble Quiver prepared the work s for performance at the final culmination of the process: today’s concert at Iwaki Auditorium.
This afternoon Quiver (Aviva Endean, Jessica Fotinos, Rebecca Lane, Luke Paulding, Matthias Schack-Arnott) delivered a pretty amazing performance premiering Kato’s “Alti Alati”, Solomon’s “granini di luce beccuciati da uccelli di silenzio” and my piece “5 Epigrams”. A special mention should also go to Flavia Coassin and Tindaro Di Luca for their recitations of the poetry, and of course thanks to the main organisers Dr Stefano Fossati and Dr Donna Coleman. The concert was recorded by the ABC and hopefully I’ll soon have some audio to put on here, at least an excerpt. I believe I also saw someone there videoing the event, and hopefully I can get hold of a copy as audio only wouldn’t really do the piece justice, there being a lot of visual performance elements.
As for my piece itself I’m glad I had such dedicated performers working on it, digging into the text of the poem and my research on the Futurist movement took me out on a limb with a few of the ideas I threw in there and being the excellent performers they are Quiver made it work. What follows is the text from the preamble that Dr Coleman read out before the piece.
“This piece picks out what I found to be the most vivid phrases in each
section of Ventroni’s text, and responds to and illustrates them
aurally and peformatively. These at times confronting images and the
abstract mode of their combination formed the foundation of this
piece, upon which I composed my own poem in sound.
At a fundamental level inspiration was also taken from the rhythms of
Ventroni’s language in the original and in translation, and from the
very idea of translation itself, which as an English speaker was
unavoidable in dealing with the text and which became very important
to me in making this work.”
Dictaphone recording of the premiere of ‘Burning Water’ by the Southbank Brass Ensemble at BMW Edge. Conducted by Russell Davis.
Recording of the premiere of Red Tree . Red Earth . Red Water by the Yarra Trio at Melba Hall in 2008.
Program note:
Red Tree . Red Earth . Red Water is one of a group of compositions concerned with the idea of stillness and the attempt to arrest time in what is essentially a temporal medium. This is my first foray into the piano trio genre and also serves as a preliminary exploration of the timbral palette which can be drawn from this particular group of instruments. The title of this piece is not intended to communicate a specific narrative or image, but rather exists as a point of reference from which the listener may experience the music.
This is a recording I made using my little dictaphone at the VCAM Soundout concert, the recording comes up surprisingly well, and the music’s not half bad either.
Camille Robinson
3rd Year Recital
Hybrid Space, VCAM
My final undergraduate recital, jam packed full of new works.
Southbank Symphony Orchestra
Soundout 10th Anniversary Celebration
August 19, 7:00pm
Iwaki Auditorium
World Premiere of ‘The Colour of Time’
2 bodies in space, 2 sources of sound, 2 personalities in dialogue.
Small Things Collective
Preliminary Showing
Thursday October 22, 4:30pm
Hybrid Space, VCAM
Preliminary showing of the piece ‘2’, which starts from the assumption that a dancer can’t move without making sound, just as a musician can’t make sound without moving, and aims to explore the performative space between sound and dance, and the physical space between performer and viewer. This the latest collaboration between composer Camille Robinson and choreographer Caley O’Neill, and is the most ‘collaborative’ to date, placing the two modes of performance on an even level, and even exchanging the role of sound-maker and mover between the trained and the untrained.
Performers: Caley O’Neill and Camille Robinson
Directed by: Gabby Rose, Caley O’Neill and Camille Robinson
Quiver
Institute of Italian Culture International Composition Competition Finalists’ Concert
October 4, 2:30pm
Iwaki Auditorium
World premiere of ‘5 Epigrams’
This concert marks the culmination of the Institute of Italian Culture International Composition Competition and will include premieres of works by Chiaki Kato, Mike Solomon, and ‘5 Epigrams’ by me, as well as performances of works by adjudicators Mark Pollard and Carlo Forlivesi. The works will be performed by the contemporary music ensembles Quiver and Golden Fur.
Camille Robinson 