An update

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Dear Making Waves Friends,

We would like to thank you for supporting this project over the last 8+ years as we set out to shine the spotlight on the unique sounds of our art music colleagues in Australia and beyond. We were incredibly honoured to receive an APRA/AMCOS and AMC Art Music Award in 2020 as State Luminary for VIC for our work in “breaking down perceived state barriers and connecting a new generation of Australian musicians.” Shout out: this award also recognises the vital role of you, the listener.

At the beginning of 2020, looking back on five years of Making Waves, we decided to take a short unofficial “long service leave.” Like most people, we did not foresee the pandemic, and the juggling of our growing families, changing jobs, moving state, doctoral studies, homeschooling and cost of living, which required a re-balancing on all our parts. So, for now, the monthly playlists are on an extended break.

We would like to acknowledge the incredible team of volunteers throughout the country who came together between 2015-2020 to elevate the work of the art music community. Our team has been passionate and committed, continuously embodying an ingrained spirit of curiosity and generosity towards celebrating each other’s successes within the industry. On a personal level, this project has been enriching and fun, and we are proud of our achievements. In particular, representing Australian Music at Classical: Next in Rotterdam, producing the Making Conversation: Australian Composers’ Podcast, and creating pathways for you, the listener, to discover and enjoy amazing and recent new music. It has not only meant a lot to us and the composers and musicians who created the music. It has been a pleasure to give our time to a project that is very close to our hearts.

Whilst we take some time to rest and dream up our next creative adventure, we encourage you to explore the website, visit archived playlists, or the Making Conversation Podcast featuring interviews with 29 Australian composers.

Yours,

Peggy and Lisa

Sacred Music Waves (December 2019)

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Rachel Bruerville, curator of this month’s playlist and Making Waves Intern during 2019 shares the following thoughts about this special collection of recordings:

As an introduction to the final Making Waves #playlist of 2019, ‘Sacred Music Waves’, I would like to share some somewhat rambling thoughts on ‘sacredness’, Australian music, and culture.

Our ‘Sacred Music Waves’ playlist features quite an Anglo-centric collection of music. As someone who works in the office of an Anglican Cathedral, and who is a ‘classical’ choir nerd, my bias is probably showing! The idea for a sacred music playlist came from my revelation, as a composer who had never attended an Anglican choral service before beginning work in this office, that oh my gosh! There are mass settings and motets sung every single week to a captive audience who connect deeply with the music? What an incredible thing.

But what else might be considered ‘sacred’? The theme of country is certainly a very sacred thing. In Australian music making, considering the background of our shameful history, the appropriation of First Nations artistic and cultural material by non-Indigenous Australian composers is a very fraught area. Fortunately, awareness of these issues continues to grow among the musical community, as do respectful, genuine collaborations.

This is the first playlist I’ve curated, and it’s been quite overwhelming grappling with some of these issues of sacredness, diversity, representation, and, as always, what might make our music ‘sound Australian’… as well as searching for sharable recordings through this online platform!

I acknowledge the First Nations peoples of this land I call home, and the sacred nature of this music making that continues to thrive.

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Evolving Waves (November 2019)

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The hour of music in this month’s playlist ranges from compositions for Balinese gamelan instruments, to saxophone quartet, a site-specific clarinet performance, to the trusty pianoforte. Common to each of these striking works is a sense of gradual movement, of sonic evolution; we invite you to savour these journeys as the soundtrack to your day, or drop everything and enjoy a mindful sitting with these nine wonderful composers and their works.

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Piano Waves (October 2019)

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This month we are excited to present a playlist exclusively focused on piano works. In curating ‘Piano Waves’, we wanted to showcase the expressive power and tonal colour of the piano. The eight Australian composers featured this month have created works that range from sprightly and sweetly melodic miniatures (such as Anne Cawrse’s piece ‘The Red Buoy’), energetic improvised-like music (Yitzhak Yedid’s ‘Angels’ Revolt’) to atmospheric fixed media soundscapes influenced by nature (Miriama Young’s ‘Grey Ghost’) and/or extended techniques (Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh’s piece ‘Chamber of Glistening Whispers’).   

If you would like to continue down the listening path of newly-composed piano-based works, we invite you to take a trip into our archives and explore our ‘Keyboard Waves’ playlist from November 2016.

We encourage you to listen, share and enjoy this hour of music, and warmly invite all composers to submit your works to the Making Waves curation pool for possible inclusion in a future playlist.

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Vocal Waves II (August 2019)

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Returning to our familiar haunt of Soundcloud this month, we are delighted to focus on the voice again this month, in a “part 2” continuation of the earlier Vocal Waves playlist (September 2017) and also the Spoken Waves playlist (September 2016). There is something centering about voice and language when it is present in music, whether for solo voices, small or large groups of singers, with or without instruments. We hope the various songs of celebration, contemplation and/or wonder from these 7 composers lead you on your own journey of reflection.

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Circumnavigating Waves (July 2019)

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A journey through the Making Waves archives will reveal that most of our listening activity takes place via Soundcloud. It’s free (or relatively affordable), and it’s a user-generated-content platform with less barriers to entry and more consistent content than some online destinations. For this month’s playlist we wanted to journey further afield and highlight some of the works received via a few services. Composers and performers, we always encourage you to submit your work for possible inclusion in a Making Waves playlist no matter where it may be hosted. It may take longer to build up enough of a submission pool for a playlist, but we are listening and noting all incoming tracks.

Without further ado, here are four immersive longer-form tracks hosted at various websites ( Vimeo, Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube). Listeners, we ask you to take a slightly more active role in clicking on this webpage to hear each featured track, circumnavigating the geographical world via electrons signalling various URLs. But in return, we promise evocative and intriguing listening, right through the spectrum of sonic media from acoustic to soundscape.†

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Drama Waves (June 2019)

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In this month’s listening adventures we explore the theme of drama, bringing together five works that have strong narrative or theatrical resonance. From the naive to the ancient, to the personal, to the meta, each composer’s perspective is unique, and we hear active or evolving arcs alongside interior, reflective sonic journeys. Similarly, the instrumentation called upon by the five composers featured (who incidentally are all new faces to the Making Waves ecosystem, welcome!) range from solo through to orchestral forces.

As always, we encourage you to listen, share and enjoy this hour of music, and warmly invite all composers to submit your works to the Making Waves curation pool for possible inclusion in a future playlist.

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Harmonic Waves (May 2019)

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We’re delighted to feature ten wonderful composers and works in this month’s playlist Harmonic Waves. The connecting thread between these stylistically divergent works is harmony: some preoccupation with the sonorities arising from pitch relationships – intervals, chords, chord progressions, ostinati – whether across the familiar diatonic grid or in the granular spaces between. These collected works offer quite evocative explorations of themes of motion, emotion and/or communication across the musical spectrum from jazz to concert art music. We hope you enjoy and savour these sounds from some familiar and some new featured composers.

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Electronic Waves (April 2019)

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This month’s playlist, curated by graduating intern Aidan Maizels, is a collection of works that involve prominent electronic elements in their realisation.

With technological advances in musical hardware and software over the past decade, we have seen a surge in the interest of electronics in just about every genre and style. Whilst this has mainly culminated in an explosion of EDM producers of varying levels of talent, this has also resulted in many art music composers acquainting themselves with use of technology in their works.

As well as having a whole world of new sounds becoming regular fixtures in the art music world, the improvement in computer technology allows a lot of works to be realised that may not have been previously. Whether it be because of physical impracticalities in performance, such as temperamental synths going out of tune, certain effects being unreplicatable in real-time, or plainly just too many notes to be performed by a human. Now, effectively with the power of a complete recording studio in the size of a lunchbox, it has opened up many sonic avenues for composers to explore, unhindered by the constraints of yesteryear.

This playlist includes seven works by Australian composers that use electronics in unique ways to create a variety of different moods.

We begin with Zoltan Fecso’s ‘Pont’, which combines the acoustic sounds of piano and percussion with processed guitar and electronics to create a relaxing near-futuristic hybrid environment. Fiona Hill explores the beautiful sounds hidden within pink noise in the apparently titled ‘RhythmicPinkNoise’. Cameron Lam’s ‘Golden Bird’ is a beautifully written piece in a more traditional romantic style for Electronic Wind Instrument accompanied by piano. Alexis Weaver’s heavily manipulated sounds of a children’s toy create a brilliantly dark and sinister atmosphere in ‘Submarine’. Carolyn Schofield (Fia Fiell)’s semi-improvised ‘At The First Clear Word’ begins by exploring the technique of ‘beating’ waves created by sounds close in pitch played simultaneously, before developing into a mysterious, yet comforting atmosphere (my favourite part is the feel change and echoed synths from 4:10). The penultimate piece is Amber Hansen’s epic sound collage ‘The Last Veil’, created from recordings of Arabic music recitals, based on Ishtar’s journey through the seven gates of the underworld. The playlist concludes with Neil Maizels’ sound collage ‘The World Is Calmer Than You Would Think’, created by layering flute, harp, cor anglais and treated strings in a unique soundscape that documents the phenomenon of conflicting emotions occurring in one space simultaneously.

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International Women’s Day 2019

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The theme for International Women’s Day in 2019 is #BalanceforBetter.

Happy International Women’s Day! The team would like to acknowledge that lists such as these invariably exclude more composers than they promote. However, we embrace the opportunity to reflect on the striking music featured by female-identifying composer in Making Waves playlists and the Making Conversation Podcast since our inception in 2015.  We continue to welcome all composers, but in particular encourage women and gender diverse composers to submit your recordings to the Making Waves curation pool at any time and as often as you like.

We’ve collected a few examples of some ways composers and musicians are working towards a “Balance for Better” in our musical communities. This list is something we’re going to be building on over time in a special  dedicated resource page on our website to commend the work of inclusive and forward thinking creatives (coming soon). If you have suggestions of continuing initiatives or forward thinking ensembles and organisations to add, please comment below or email us at makingwavesnewmusic@gmail.com.

And now, over 20 hours of musical works and podcast audio for you to discover and enjoy! Listen through in order today while you work, bookmark to return, click shuffle to be surprised or all of the above!

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String Quartet Waves (March 2019)

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Making Waves is delighted to share this month’s playlist, String Quartet Waves!

As an ensemble, the string quartet has been codified such that is a genre unto itself. Perhaps this is due to its typical designation for the most intimate and considered of thoughts, from Beethoven to Shostakovich, and Schoenberg to Crumb. Yet despite its age, it is a genre that is ever contemporary. Championed by quartets such as Kronos Quartet and JACK Quartet, the genre is filled with brilliant new compositions.

In Australia, the string quartet has found another home, in the creations of Sculthorpe and Westlake, and in the work of ensembles such as the Australian String Quartet, Flinders Quartet and Acacia Quartet. As such we are excited to share a collection of contemporary Australian string quartets, filled with contrasting moods, energies and complexities. We hope you can sit back and enjoy this months playlist.

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Waves of Consciousness (February 2019)

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Happy New Year, listeners!

We’re delighted to welcome 2019 (our 5th year!) with this immersive playlist of audiovisual recordings titled Waves of Consciousness.  These seven amazing works are deeply contemplative, thematically and aesthetically. When we titled the playlist, we contemplated the individual reflecting on various broader contexts, noting their consciousness of things beyond their immediate self, e.g. the environment, humanity and mortality.   The works feature small chamber music instrumentation that we felt reinforces a closeness and level of detail across the various themes explored. We love the opportunity to release video playlists that feature performance footage of the work, adding another layer of immersion and celebration of musical talent to this month’s listening experience. We hope you find this as enjoyable and thought-provoking as our growing Making Waves team has. Don’t forget to leave your words of support for these talented composers and musicians by visiting their profiles, following their sites, sharing their work and leaving a comment below.

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