SALLY WHITWELL: Hi, my name is Sally Whitwell. I'm a composer and a pianist, living and working on Gadigal land in Sydney. I came to composing quite late in my career at the ripe old age of 34. I decided, 'oh, I like other people's music, but I think I can do this'. So it's been an interesting journey as a late starter. I really love writing for the piano, which I play, and I love writing for voices.
My work 'Pictures at an ExHERbition' is actually a, it's a response to an existing work by a Russian composer, Modest Mussogsky, which is all called 'Pictures at an Exhibition'. And I love this piece. It's a piano piece and it responds to a number of artworks, but it's just very male. It's a male composer and a male artist, and a male protagonist in the little story, which is like a little man walking around an art gallery. And it's always been one of my favourite things, but I just really felt the maleness of it. And so I decided, oh, I'm gonna respond to it by selecting a bunch of my favourite Australian women artists over the last hundred years or so and to write song responses to them. So it's what's known as an ekphrastic song, and that means responding to a visual stimulus.
This project, Pictures at an exHERbition, has been a really great opportunity to work with a vocal ensemble like Luminescence Chamber Singers who are so expert, but I'm more accustomed to writing for a choir. So this ensemble where I get to have five really different individual voices with very different color is so exciting as an instrument to write for as a composer–it's been really wonderful.
When I'm writing specifically for a performer, I can hear their sound inside my head while I'm writing it. So I know what's gonna be possible and I know what they bring. It's interesting too because I, before I started on this project, I knew three of the singers very well and for a long time, and two of them I didn't know at all, so I was kind of writing in a sort of generic way for them but when I got to rehearsal with them, I was able to say, oh, I can hear what you do now and so I'm gonna ask you to do this differently. I'm gonna make these little changes so that it sits in your instrument really comfortably and shows the world the best of what you have, shows them what you bring to performance–and for every singer that is a different thing. Of all the singers in the world, there's so many and they all bring a new thing (laugh). So it's a quite a luxury actually to have that opportunity to write for people you're getting to know really well.
I know that in classical music world we focused so intently on sound and that quite often the, I wanna say the attitude is–that's why orchestras wear black because classical music decided that too much colour and movement and visual will detract from the music. But I feel this kind of opposite thing, like I want everybody to see and hear everything at the same time (laugh). So it's important to me that people know where the inspiration comes from.
And what I was trying to do is connect my world, classical music, to the art world because we can be pretty siloed in classical music, but I just don't believe that we don't love other things. I think people do secretly love all other kinds of art, but they don't know how to talk about it; they don't know how to put them together. So I'm just trying to create that little avenue, like a little path for my world into this world.
AJ AMERICA: My name is AJ America. I am a singer and the Artistic Director of Luminescence Chamber Singers and Luminescence Children's Choir.
We're a organisation based here in Canberra, in the National Capital and the Luminescence Chamber Singers are a professional vocal ensemble we are six singers working together to make chamber music, as well as running a fabulous group for young musicians, the Luminescence Children's Choir are aged 10 to 17. Both of our ensembles have been involved in the project 'Pictures at an exHERbition' with composer and pianist, Sally Whitwell.
One of the things that we love to do at Luminescence is work very closely with composers and to work on new music. I think living Australian music is a huge part of what we do, and for us, music is very much alive –part of that is to work closely with composers. We've been working with Sally on these pieces in response to works in the National Gallery's collection.
That's a super interesting process for us as musicians, because as musicians we're very used to working in a form that doesn't have visuals. But actually when we work with composers and you have to try in words to talk about what you want to do together or, you know, I want it a little bit more like this or a little bit less like this, we call on visual imagery all the time. We talk about it being a little hazier or sing it like chocolate and so it's amazing to have a real visual medium to respond to.
I think that has really informed the way we've been approaching this work musically. It was really easy singing Sally's piece Polygonigal for the first time to see where it should be angular, because the work Boulder #2, is so angular, but so colourful.
For me Pictures at an exHERbition has been about inviting people to engage in art, however it strikes them. To not feel they need permission or deep scholarly understanding, but to remember that all art is supposed to make us feel something and that we're all very able to do that. You don't need to know a lot or have great insight into where that piece of art sits in history or how it maybe was made to have a response to it–those responses are always valid and that's the point.
