... ...Special Exhibitions Gallery, Scienceworks, Spotswood......Audio: Excerpt from Scienceworks concert, 1992...Merlyn Quaife (soprano), Tom Considine, John Jacobs and William Henderson (actors)
Michael Kieran Harvey (piano)
The Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey
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Saturday November 7, 1992
SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS GALLERY, SCIENCEWORKS, Spotswood
choral songs with invented instruments and live electronics by composers from La Trobe University. Wroks by:
Brahms, Maahler, Ravel, Michael Hewes, Steve Adam, Cindy John, David Hirst, Martin Friedel, Martin Wesley-Smith, Graeme Leak and Jeff Pressing
Melbourne’s science museum on the Yarra at Spotswood combines the French chateau style of the 19th-century pumping station with a modern circular building – an environment for a program combining traditional choral sound with live sound processing, electronic music and newly-invented instruments.
...(To Smoke), and Excerpt 2: Improvising voices & Michael Hewes (computer-processing): Out Of Voice (1992)
“All must turn to smoke,the earth’s bright mass,and heaven’s azure too”
From the concert at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Scienceworks, Spotswood on Saturday November 7, 1992.
Astra in association with the La Trobe University Music Department: with invented percussion, live electronics, voices.
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Music always interacts with the architecture in which it is heard.
Melbourne has some wonderful acoustic environments. Often, these spaces were built for other purposes – for example the splendid public and ecclesiastical buildings from the first 100 years of the city’s history, and more recent industrial constructions.
Exploiting ‘non-customized’ spaces for musical performance celebrates and explores our architectural heritage.
For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building.
The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.
In this story take a tour of some of Melbourne’s intimate, hidden spaces and listen to the music that has filled their walls.
For further information about Astra Chamber Music Society click here.
