Name: James O'Brien by Grainger Museum
Duration: 30 s
Description: Interactive Composition students have used their time in isolation to create bespoke pieces of music reflecting on the COVID-19 situation.

Free Music experiment using the Kangaroo Pouch Tone-Tool, creating test patterns with three oscillators. Burnett Cross can be heard part way through the recording. c1952.

Kangaroo Pouch Tone-Tool experiment

My piece 'Meta Self' is limited to only using the sounds from Percy Grainger’s wooden marimba. I took a minimalist approach inspired by Phillip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Ivan Trevino. I have tied my piece to Percy Grainger by layering multiple melodic lines from his most famous pieces (Handel on the Stand, Lincolnshire Posy, etc) and adapted them to fit the key of my piece.

Olivia Marsh - (Meta Self)- Marimba

Sampled from Percy Grainger’s Metal Marimba, a spacious musical soundscape is created through polyphonic harmonies recreated on an Ableton MIDI sampler keyboard. The piece centralises on ideas of tension, evoked sonically through additive polyphony, contrasting cool and warm equalised marimbas, unexpected time signature changes, microtonal modulations from C minor to C half sharp minor and juxtapositional binaural positioning of themes to create a sense of the uncanny.

Nathan Zammit - Eternality

Currently I am very interested in the use of tuned and untuned metal percussion as a point of crossover between harmonically based Western compositional thought, and the timbral, rhythmic and intensely melodic conception of Hindustani classical music. Bells have played a central role in human life for thousands of years; the Federation Bells are an exceptionally resonant instrument both acoustically and culturally. As I compose for a specific physical space within the Grainger Museum, simultaneously I’m learning about how my own musical preoccupations fit within the broader context of landscape and cultural identity in Australian music history. The How it Plays project at the Grainger Museum was a very exciting chance for me to compose in a participatory setting open to the public. I am working on open ended pieces which everyone is welcome to explore, whether by following a graphic score or reading conventional notation.

Percy Grainger described the sound of opera singer Nellie Melba’s voice as having ‘the searching, continuous, trancelike vibrations of the middle-distance blues in Australian upcountry-scapes’. This vivid image inspired me as I began working with the bell sounds. Subconsciously I began to hear the long ‘beats’ of the cluster chords as mountain ranges, undulating forms stretching into the distance – earth waves like the sonic waves of the bells. I was filled with a sense of time on a vast scale, and the feeling of impermanence which often attends such thoughts. - Kate Tempany

A Deep Blue Shimmering Haze

Interactive Composition students have used their time in isolation to create bespoke pieces of music reflecting on the COVID-19 situation.

James O'Brien

No. 1​ is a sound experiment, inspired by​ Percy Grainger’s Free Music​ that takes ocean wave height data (metres) from the coast of Victoria and converts it to audio frequency (Hz) as performance input for a multi-sample instrument.
A literal approach to the story of Grainger’s dreams of gliding tones while watching the ocean near his home as a child, this piece uses the strict guidelines of his original score as a framework for data manipulation, attempting to hear what the contours of the ocean ​actually sound like.

Dom Willmott - No. 1 As Free And As Infinitely Variable As The Waves

The Grainger Museum was established by composer and pianist Percy Grainger (1882-1961) and is the only purpose-built autobiographical museum in Australia.

Grainger’s most famous work, an arrangement of the Morris dance tune Country Gardens, sold 27,000 copies per year at the height of its popularity in the 1920s and broke its publishers sales records for 75 years. Grainger channelled the earnings from his great commercial success into a Museum dedicated to the creative process. The collection contains not only objects directly related to Grainger’s compositional career, such as scores and manuscripts, but also over 50,000 items of correspondence, business files, diaries, ethnographic objects, furniture, artworks and clothing.

Grainger began work on the Museum after his mother’s death in 1922 and it was officially opened in December 1938. The building was designed by the University's architect, John Gawler of the firm Gawler and Drummond, in close consultation with Grainger. The Museum’s historical and architectural significance is recognised by the building’s inclusion on the Register of the National Estate and the Victorian Heritage Register, and classification by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria).

In 1955 Grainger set down his revised Aims of the Grainger Museum, outlining his ‘cosmopolitan and universalist outlook on music’. Grainger’s wide ranging interests has resulted in a unique Museum with broad appeal, a must-see for locals and tourists alike.

James O'Brien

Grainger Museum

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