Boho Deco, new MA, and a host of other developments

I think I remember that a visual artist somewhere made a video piece by trawling the internet for blog posts that started with the phrase “OMG, I haven’t posted for soooo long!” and variations on that kind of a statement, so I’m going to avoid saying that… but gosh, I never meant for it be so long between entries…

Not that I’ve been idle. I’ve posted some new audio on the Listen page, including my most recent piece Bohemian Deconstruction, commissioned as part of the Polyartistry/Opera Australia collaboration Polyopera – a project designed to re-invent 3 classic operas from Opera Australia’s 2011 mainstage season for the internet generation.

With a libretto put together by writer David Finnigan from lines and suggestions submitted via Twitter, it was a really interesting process – and a treat to work with artists from Opera Australia.

I was asked to write a feature article about my part in Bohemian Deconstruction for Resonate, the Australian Music Centre’s online magazine. It was great to be able to write for them, as I was actually only admitted to associate artist status at the start of the year, which was good news and about time… I’d been putting off applying for representation for about 15 years! The AMC is the national service organisation dedicated to the promotion and support of new Australian music and the staff there – led by the indefatigable John Davis – have always been very supportive of me and my work, so it’s been good to formalise the relationship and start to lodge my back-catalogue of pieces with them.

This and all other projects have been necessarily fitted in around my writing and production duties for the new MA album, which has finally been mixed and mastered and is awaiting release pending all the other stuff – cover art, videos, distribution agreements, licensing, etc which now fill my every waking moment. But the good news is that it sounds fantastic, I’m very pleased with the result and think it has legs… it’s called Dance Until My Heart Breaks and quite frankly, I may!

Chopin premiere… and not a moment/month too soon!

At the start of this year, I finished writing the piano suite that forms the first part of my Chopin Project – a large-scale, multi-stage project that starts with a series of piano pieces based on Chopin’s Preludes. Writing them was, despite the inevitable crises (wait- let me get this straight: I’m writing music based on Chopin and sending it off to Poland? Am I crazy?), intensely pleasurable – I don’t think I’d enjoyed writing purely instrumental music this much in at least a decade. And I think it shows in the music, and I still enjoy listening to them (my MIDI mock-up performances) almost a year later.

They were always intended to be premiered this year, the 200th anniversary of Chopin’s birth, and it’s been a long road to getting to this performance, but we’ve made it, and just in the nick of time thanks to the Australian Institute of Music where I teach. Turns out from an HSC music-student’s perspective this is a good gig to go and see – you can kill two birds with one stone (new Australian music from the past 25 years – tick! – and a 19th century study – tick!).

Chopin Project

They will of course be premiered by the wonderful Zubin Kanga, for whom they were written and who has been learning them over the past few months living in London where he’s completing his PhD… which means that I’ve not heard them yet. He gets back next week, and I can hardly wait until then to hear what he’s done with them. In a good way.

October wash-up

It’s been a very busy few months – lots of it having little to do with music, what with relocating my home and studio to Newtown, a veritable tree-change after the very authentic grit & grime of Surry Hills where I’ve lived & worked for the past 11 years. So a very big move, even if it’s only a few kilometers as the crow flies. For all the stress of the transition I’m very happy in my new digs, as are my plants – we now have a back garden area with access to sunlight all day, natural rainfall, and a hose. How I got around to working on the new MA tracks or uploading so much audio to the Listen section of this site staggers me (there’s also a sneak preview in the Chopin Project 2010 section).

In amongst all of this the My Mutation competition came to it’s delightful conclusion on Sunday 26th September with the announcement of the winner Sarah McCreanor from Brisbane, who came down to dance on the Opera House Forecourt with a very talented troupe of volunteers all choreographed by Kate Champion. Kate’s concept of a sudden, surprise start to the competition’s grand finale dance that would feel like a flash-mob performance was really terrific – the crowd, myself included, was completely taken in and when the dancing started it was exhilarating. There was a Footloose dance class happening on the stage, getting the audience warmed up for a screening of the film later in the evening, and it was interrupted by these killjoy security guards who started moving people off the stage, getting boos from the crowd. But then….

You can now see the whole sequence on YouTube – there’s a video diary thing by Sarah at the start but the dancing gets going at around the 6 minute mark (though it’s worth watching earlier for the dance class footage – everyone was really good!).

And in other news, it looks like we have a date for the premiere of the Chopin Project Piano Suite (still untitled, unfortunately): December 3, 2010 at 1.30pm, just scraping into this momentous 200th anniversary year. It’s going to be presented by the Australian Institute of Music where I teach, and it will be put on free for HSC students from around the city, followed by a mini-lecture from me about how the works were written and how they might go about using those techniques in their HSC works. Zubin is back in London, madly learning them as I type, and in truth I’m rather looking forward to hearing him play them. I’ve gotten so used to the MIDI version I imagine it will be quite disorienting when I first hear them, but I’m hoping hoping it will be a pleasant kind of disorientation.

For those interested in attending, let me know – there’ll be some room for GP so get in touch if you’d like to come.

Launch of MyMutation

This week is the launch of MyMutation – the Sydney Opera House’s online dance competition leading up to their Spring Dance Festival. It’s a multi-stage competition that anyone – anywhere in the world – can enter, where a 20-second dance originally choreographed by my beautiful & talented friend Kate Champion grows and morphs in the hands of the public until there’s only one dancer left standing. The details of prizes and how to enter are here, but the whole shebang leads towards a huge performance on the forecourt of the Opera House on September 26, which is going to be very exciting.

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post my full 100-second version of the music here yet but will put it up in the Listen section in due course. In the meantime, here’s the first section, as choreographed by Kate:

This was really fun to work on, if a little difficult at first – the task of writing in 20-second chunks that adds up to a piece of music that is coherent and builds to a satisfying climax was quite an interesting challenge, and there were a few false starts along the way (any of which could well end up on the next MA album – waste not, want not!). It was also complicated by the fact that I really wanted to include a metric modulation, a fancy musical device that I now teach at AIM (though somehow I was never taught at school). Whenever I teach the technique, distressed students always ask if I ever use it and I’ve never been able to say yes. Now I can say I’ve got a nifty example to play them… one for the nerds, there.

You can hear it in the transition from the first to the second sections in these videos, but hopefully you’re not even aware of it (that’s always the idea with tricky techniques for me). Here the producers have got Eddie & Julie-Anne to demonstrate how to learn the solo, interpret it and then add their own choreography to it. My little niece (9) is already having a crack at doing her own version at home, and hopefully there’ll be plenty more uploaded to the site over the next month or so.

(And yes, that’s me singing along on the track…)

Launch of The Nun’s Picnic, July 2 2010

Ok, so to spruik the upcoming launch of my new CD with Zubin Kanga The Nun’s Picnic: Variations on a theme sung by Tammy Wynnette, I’ve decided to post a little teaser audio so you can all hear what it is exactly you’re looking forward to at next Friday’s concert. This is the last of four movements of the piece: I’ve given titles that are hopefully evocative of some of the ideas from the origins of the music as the score for a dance work.

And while you’re listening (although undivided attention is always best) here’s the program note I’ve written for the concert:

I       Setting out
II     Cool, dead leaves
III    Moonlight, eucalypts…
IV     You’ll never walk alone

The Nun’s Picnic was originally written over 6 days in February 2005 for Julie-Anne Long’s dance solo Nun, one part of her larger series of live performance works, films, exhibitions and installations inspired by Jeffrey Smart’s painting Picnic at Hill End.  The solo, in which “the shadows of the late afternoon seduced [her] along and off the beaten track, into the darkness of the bush….” concluded with a cathartic, whirling dance to Tammy Wynette’s classic country recording of You’ll Never Walk Alone from Rogers & Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel.

As a result, the piano music for the rest of the solo is based entirely on the vocal performance from that recording (as well as certain features of it’s arrangement and harmonic structure). Various types and interpretations of the idea of a canon were used as the main material for the four movements, which had to express the isolation, stillness, sensuality, ecstasy and ultimate acceptance of the stage piece. The current form of The Nun’s Picnic is an edited version for concert performance of the original dance score.

This being the fourth movement we’ve come to the “ultimate acceptance” part of the work, but there’s still sensuality in it – I think Zubin has done an absolutely stunning job playing this as well. This music is very important to me, I’ve realised, and so I’m really looking forward to it’s first ever performance as a stand-alone piece.

The CD also contains a fifth bonus track, The Nun’s Picnic (Nun’s Night Out remix), an electronic treatment of the piano music for The Nun’s Picnic that formed the soundtrack to the film Nun’s Night Out, another part of Julie-Anne’s Nun project. Made with the wonderful Sam James, you can watch it on his Vimeo site. It’s a real gem, and I would have embedded it here for you to watch except that it didn’t work when I tried do it (repeatedly).

The concert where we’re launching the CD is  “Piano – Inside/Out” presented by chronology arts and it’s on next Friday 2nd July 2010 @ 7pm at the Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Tickets are available on (02) 8256 2222 or from here (Adults $30, Concession/Seniors $20/$15)

Program

The Four Seasons by Liza Lim

The Nun’s Picnic by Drew Crawford

Three Windows by Newton Armstrong

Towers of Silence by Rolf Hind

Interventions by Alex Pozniak

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Thanks, and hope to see you there!

My debut CD?

Very excited this morning to receive back from the printers what I suddenly realised was my first solo CD release: The Nun’s Picnic: Variations on a theme sung by Tammy Wynnette.

Which is all kinds of incorrect of course because so many other people are involved when you do anything like this: the music on the CD is performed – gorgeously – by Zubin Kanga and was recorded & mixed by Richard Hundy at Q, etc, etc… Rob Murray has done an amazing job with the cover, and it looks beautiful. (The actual cover is a cardboard sleeve done in a great matte finish, so it’s tactile & seductive, too. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out.)

My point is it’s never really solo, “just you” working on something. (Even that Jessica girl who sailed “solo” around the world – all props to her of course, but there’s still a team of people getting the money and equipment together, “liaising” with the media, tracking her via GPS, etc.)

Anyway.

This is however the first release I’ve done where it contains only music that I have written. We’ve set this up as a precursor to our work on the piano suite for the Chopin Project, which will premiere later this year and be recorded in 2011, and I couldn’t be happier really.

Zubin’s launching the CD at his solo recital presented by chronology arts coming up on July 2 at the Sydney Conservatorium – he’s going to give the world premiere of The Nun’s Picnic along with a diverse range of works by other composers on the bill, so please come down to support this wonderful artist and buy a copy of the limited edition Nun’s Picnic CD!

http://www.facebook.com/?sk=events#!/event.php?eid=133498973327064

Will post audio files and more about the piece before the launch, but must get on now.

Drew

Welcome

This site still under construction but please feel free to have a look around at what’s already here.

And check out my Chopin Project, my current work for 2010.

Thanks,

Drew