Tag: Sophie van Dijk

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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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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Human Waves (October 2018)

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The concept for this playlist came from the idea of the human relationships that underpin all creative practices. How we interact with one another is the foundation of live performance and inherent to the process of creating new music. This month’s playlist was curated by Making Waves team member Marlēné Claudine Radice.

The pieces featured in this month’s playlist explicitly highlight what it means to relate to ones humanity through music. Whether it be through the physical body such as Caerwen Martin’s exploration of the relationship between mother and child or Mark Holdsworth’s musical depictions of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits.

A fundamental part of human relationships and identity stems from our ability to act and think autonomously. The notion of what it means to be an autonomous individual is examined by Rishin Singh and Sophie Van Dijk. Both pieces by these composers explore how individuals react to one another in various situations, how the human and an individual can shape and mould their performance. Individual and collective responses to ritual are explored in James Hazel’s work, in which performers are encouraged to consider ritualised performance practices. These works encourage individual thought and require performers to decide for themselves how they will respond to each score.

Aaron Pelle and Antonia Zappia’s works depict a subtler aspect of the humanity inherent to music composition, the ideas expressed though emotion and how these ideas form, reform and collapse into each other. These ideas are extended further in Joseph Tabua’s work as he depicts our relationship between what it means to be human and how we as humans relate to the idea of consciousness within our creations.

Take some time to delve into adventure, art, the self and robots.

Enjoy!

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