... South Melbourne Town Hall...Photograph: South Melbourne Town Hall...The grand 19th-century space of South Melbourne Town Hall, its flat floor criss-crossed with podia and walkways, provided a theatrical environment for Conversations Before The Silence (1990) Martin Friedel’s first cantata on themes of science...Listen to Excerpt 1: Martin Friedel, Radium, from “Conversations Before the Silence” (1990)
Marie Curie and Pierre Curie: “Turn out the light… listen to the heartbeat of the universe”
Friday August 10 & Saturday August 11 1990
South Melbourne ...
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.
