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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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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Mythical Waves (April 2018)

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This month we embark on an exploration of music centred around folklore, fairytales and mythology. To our delight many of the works in this playlist focus on the vibrant female heroines central to many mythological tales. Alice Chance’s Infernal Women and Evan Lawson’s Sirens, highlight the dark mysticism of the women of classical mythology who were both beautiful and a force to be feared.

Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and War is explored by Aristea Mellos while Chris Williams describes the depth of the goddess Polyhymnia, a daughter of Zeus. Both goddesses are associated with sacred poetry and song and they inherent mysticism of music when entwined with wisdom and knowledge.

Ostara, the germanic Goddess of Spring and fertility is the central figure in Cassie To’s Ostara’s Equinox. The notions of rebirth in nature, equality and fertility that came with the coming of spring are explored through pagan mythology that has been subsequently lost as it has been absorbed by other practices.

Annie Pirotta and Holly Harrison explore the exciting nature of folk tales and how seemingly innocent tales associated with childhood harbour dark truths. Both composers focus on the writings of Lewis Carroll, building upon the evocative imagery evoked by this work.

To our opening track, Peter McNamara’s The Styx, a journey into the under world. A discussion of the end of life, the journey’s we take and an opportunity to reflect on the nature of life and the ways in which mysticism might answer the unanswerable questions.

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Radiophonic Waves (March 2018)

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This month we decided to tackle the spectrum of compositions that inhabit and explore radiophonic composition. Radiophonic music developed as an artistic practice focusing on the use of electronics, abstracting and manipulating sounds to create unique pieces often designed specifically for radio. This medium places you, the listener, at the centre of the experience, how you interpret the sounds as they are divorced from a traditional concert context.

The works in this playlist are designed to immerse you in the spectrum of radiophonic sounds. Sounds from what we know are abstracted in each of these tracks, from the raw, digitally manipulated samples of organic everyday household sounds utilised by Andrew Ball and Michelle Nguyen, to the visually evocative soundscapes evoked by Fiona Hill and Jessica Wells. Electronics are used throughout this playlist to abstract how voices and conversations are heard. These range from the use of intimate recordings of family conversations by Martin K. Koszolko to Amber Hansen’s ambient mix of samples recorded in the island of Capri.

This playlist also features works by Amber Hansen and Marlene Radice which were specifically commissioned for radio play and as such have been composed the be heard via this medium, the live component of the composition being the listening act in and of itself.

All of these works are designed to be interpreted by the listener a multitude of different ways, they challenge how we listen to sounds and re-evaluate how we perceive music.

Enjoy!

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Ambient Waves (October 2017)

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Brian Eno was quoted to have once said:

“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

This month we bring you a beautiful mix of atmospheric, electronic and instrumental works that are hardly ignorable and strikingly ambient. Each composition bravely explores few musical ideas, spaces and concepts, often influenced by landscape and the universe. They invite us as listeners to sit and really listen, to savour, to challenge, to entrance, to entice for as little as 6 minutes to 18 minutes. We encourage you to listen for slow unfolding patterns and harmony, repetition, explorations of colour and fluctuations of texture and density we float away with this stimulating hour of ambience.

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