Interview with members of Tafelmusik – part 2

Tafelmusik and the Galileo team created a performance that breaks the boundaries of conventional formats. With projected images of historical and contemporary astrological observations, a broad and engrossing narration from Smyth in a wide range of different characters, and a fastidiously choreographed series of musical performances that use the entire space of the concert hall and become a kind of dance in themselves, The Galileo Project tells the story of humanity and the universe, from Galileo’s thrilling discoveries and unjust imprisonment through to the free, enlightened future that he predicted.

‘Alison did a brilliant job of putting this program together,’ Lamon enthuses. ‘It appeals to people who love music as well as people who are interested in science. It is so well paced and beautifully interwoven that it never feels didactic. People in the audience see it as a joyful experience; some are moved to tears by the beauty and breadth of the experience.’

In a glorious coup at the end of the evening, Smyth reads from German astronomer Johannes Kepler’s 1619 Harmonices Mundi, in which the laws of planetary motion are given harmonic expression. Kepler attributes a small melody to each planet, and the musicians of Tafelmusik weave these into Bach’s How brightly shines the morning star.

‘Kepler’s idea is that the celestial orbs create their own music, and are in harmony with each other,’ explains Mackay. ‘The night sky inspires so much wonder that it’s not surprising people thought of expressing that in terms of music. And we wanted to finish the program with Bach, because Bach seems the most appropriate expression of wonder at the achievements of the human spirit.’

It is this double sense of awe, at the magnitude of the universe and at the magnificence of human creation, that gives The Galileo Project its grandeur.

‘You’re on this little speck called Earth, and you’re just a little speck on this speck,’ says Lamon. ‘It makes you feel very small and very human and very vulnerable, but it also makes you feel very privileged to be a part of it.’

Galileo, in his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, comments on both the wonder of the night sky and the greatness of the achievements of the human spirit. ‘And actually, that’s what we’re doing for the entire two hours,’ says Smyth, ‘showing what humans have created. Against the backdrop of the universe, you come down to the speck that we’re on. And then you look at the incredible discoveries that have been made, the music that has been written, and the artistry of the musicians on stage – counterbalancing those two things are part of what the program is about.’

Far from fizzling out when the 2009 astronomical anniversary was over, The Galileo Project has gained a life of its own, taking Tafelmusik as far afield as China. But this Musica Viva tour will be more than just the Canadian ensemble’s Australian debut. It will also be the performers’ first chance to see the Southern Cross. And they will, they insist, be rushing out to search the sky for the new constellation after each concert.

Shirley Apthorp © 2011

Interview with members of Tafelmusik – part 1

Most of us know that Galileo was a seminal astronomer, a brilliant scientist, and a visionary. Less well-known is the fact that he played the lute. His father was an influential composer, and his circle of friends included Claudio Monteverdi.

The link between pioneering astronomy and Baroque music might have remained obscure if Canadian astronomer John Percy had not happened to be a subscriber and fan of the Toronto-based period instrument ensemble Tafelmusik. From his post on the organising committee of the International Year of Astronomy in 2009, which was celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope, he approached the group. Would it not be good to put together an evening of music around this idea?

Alison Mackay, a double-bass player with Tafelmusik, had long been dreaming of creating an evening of music for which the musicians would all play from memory. In thastre Galileo idea, she saw an opportunity.

At first, music director Jeanne Lamon was sceptical. “I was one of the last people to think that there would be any point in learning a program by heart,” she remembers. “But in fact I found that it has given us a relationship to the music and an intimacy with each other as players which is deeper than anything we’ve ever experienced with music stands.”

Inspired by the idea of a program that linked astronomy and music, Tafelmusik teamed up with actor Shaun Smyth, stage director Marshall Pynkoski, and designer Glenn Davidson for a 7-day residency at Banff, Canada’s utopic Rocky Mountains arts centre.

That time of intensive rehearsal, which culminated in a presentation attended by both music-lovers and astronomers, with a chance to view the night sky through historic telescopes for all, was the tip of the iceberg in terms of the work invested in the Galileo Project.

“In my 30 years of directing Tafelmusik, this is the best-prepared music we’ve ever presented,” says Lamon. Anxious about their capacity to memorise the music, the players added extra “play dates” to their rehearsal schedule, meeting wherever and whenever they could – including, memorably, the abandoned ballroom of a Canadian railway hotel at midnight – to run through the music.

“We were joking the other day that if we had Alzheimer’s, the last thing we would forget would be the music from the Galileo Proect, because it’s so deeply embedded in our cells now,” Lamon observes. “All that painstaking work paid off.”

© Shirley Apthorp 2011

Music to the Eyes – Tafelmusik in the Sydney Morning Herald

Music to the eyes
Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald
February 18, 2012

Classical music is luring new fans by lacing concerts with lush imagery.

When the Canadian ensemble Tafelmusik first performed The Galileo Project in their home town of Toronto, there was a party of astronomers in the audience. Their reaction was overwhelming. Many were moved to tears by the combination of baroque music with images of the night sky. It is a reaction that has been reproduced all over the world. Now Tafelmusik comes to Sydney.

The Galileo Project was developed by Alison Mackay, bass player and long-term member of Tafelmusik, as part of the 2009 International Year of Astronomy. The concert traces the legacy of astronomy in art and science, via Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler and Lully, Handel and Bach. The 17-strong period-instrument ensemble plays the entire program from memory, which frees the musicians to move around the auditorium. Suspended behind the stage is a giant, circular screen that becomes a portrait, planet or complete skyscape, illustrating the music and words.

The program has been so successful that Tafelmusik have taken it to the US, Mexico, China and Malaysia. In each location they aim to connect with the astronomy community, using local images of the night sky and hosting star parties – mass viewings through whatever telescopes can be drummed up from stargazing residents. For their Australian performances, they will incorporate images and text from Emu Dreaming, a book produced by the director of the Aboriginal Astronomy Project at Macquarie University, Ray Norris.

It sounds spectacular but is adding visuals just a prop, a gimmick to make classical music more palatable?

“No,” Mackay says, without hesitation. “It’s not that a concert needs to be livened up by pictures and narration. The repertoire is a proper concert, two 40-minute halves. The music and the images and the narration together become more than the sum of their parts… When you provide this new light on the music, it’s very exciting for the performers. It informs your performance and adds an emotional layer and that excitement communicates itself to the audience.”

Performing music with lighting and projections is nothing new. In 1909, Russian composer and famous synaesthete Alexander Scriabin wrote Prometheus: The Poem of Fire for orchestra and a custom-designed light projector, controlled by the composer from a colour keyboard. However, the technology was crude and the work is rarely performed.

Fast-forward 100 years and digital technology has caught up with Scriabin’s imagination: the technology-enhanced concert is fast becoming classical music’s Next Big Thing.

It is not just Tafelmusik. Last year’s YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert used multiple screens, video commentary and projections on the sails of the Opera House. In this year’s Sydney Festival, 41 Strings featured artwork projected on the ceiling of the concert hall and Sydney Symphony performed the soundtrack to West Side Story live as the film screened.

Is this the way of the future? Frank Gehry, architecture’s man of the moment, certainly thinks so. His latest concert hall, the New World Centre in Miami, is designed to bring concert presentation into the digital age. The main stage in the complex is surrounded by huge sails that act as both sound baffles and blank canvases to be filled with images – surtitles, program notes, close-ups and illustrations – from 14 high-definition projectors. The hall is intimate – only 748 seats – but sound and images are regularly fed live to “the Wall”, a 650-square-metre permanent screen on which all comers can watch and enjoy free concerts.

Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker after the opening festivities in February last year, said, “the fusion of film and live music is so mesmerisingly seamless that I felt I was witnessing not just a technological forward leap but the emergence of a new genre.”

“It is a new genre,” says the general manager of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Tim Calnin. “It’s not going to replace concert-giving. We still believe in the power of the abstract art form of music. But when we’re trying to reach more people and introduce them to that… purer side of the repertoire; this is a great way of doing it.”

In May, the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s artistic director, Richard Tognetti, takes off to the north-west tip of Australia with composer Iain Grandage, a band of musicians, a director, cinematographer, cameramen and surfers to develop The Reef, a work that will integrate film footage and stills with music. It is the third iteration of the award-winning Musica Surfica, a work that has introduced the orchestra to a new audience.

Meanwhile, at Sydney Symphony, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers has already almost sold out, four months before the event. “It is a different audience but it’s a big audience,” says the managing director of Sydney Symphony, Rory Jeffes.

Sydney Symphony has embraced technologically enhanced concert presentation with enthusiasm. As Jeffes points out, their performance of Holst’s The Planets last year was accompanied by high-definition footage from NASA space probes and the Hubble Space Telescope. He is also excited by the potential to reinterpret major works such as Tristan and Isolde, for example, which video artist Bill Viola and director Peter Sellars restaged with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, using multiple screens and surround sound to create an immersive but, nevertheless, live experience.

And therein lies the key. Mackay, Calnin and Jeffes agree that visual pyrotechnics and digital artistry are not going to kill live performance any time soon. Jeffes says, “If digital experience were ever able to catch up with the live experience, then that would be the biggest threat to the current operating model of orchestras. But it ain’t going to happen.

“Nothing beats being in the hall. We’re doing four performances of Beethoven 9 this week and they’re all sold out – that’s 11,000 people. The music speaks to them in a way that is beyond images.”

Carl Vine wins Bernard Heinze Memorial Award

Carl Vine

Musica Viva congratulates Artistic Director Carl Vine, recipient of the 2012 Sir Bernard Heinze Memorial Award. The award is made annually to a person who has made ‘an outstanding contribution to music in Australia,’ in honour of Sir Bernard Heinze, one of the major pioneers of orchestral musical life in Australia and Professor of Music at the University of Melbourne for 31 years. Previous recipients of the prestigious award include Maestro Richard Bonynge, pianist Stephen McIntyre, singer Yvonne Kenny, composer Peter Sculthorpe, conductor John Hopkins, horn player Barry Tuckwell, violinist Richard Tognetti, conductor and composer Brett Dean, conductor Simone Young and music educator Sir Frank Callaway.

The award, which is presented annually by the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Friends of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, was presented to Carl on 18 February at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, as part of the MSO’s concert series. Professor Gary McPherson, Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, said Mr Vine constantly pushed the boundaries of contemporary classical music.

The Makings of a Music Festival

Enso String Quartet

Planning a Festival program is like dreaming up a wonderful party for dear friends. There is great joy in taking the repertoire every artist would most like to perform, comparing it to the deepest wishes of all the others, then connecting all the jigsaw pieces to form exciting new collaborations – a rich and satisfying experience for performers and listeners alike.

Australian String Quartet

The Huntington Estate Music Festival is an opportunity to do more than just snack on ‘the classics’. It’s a time to set aside for unhurried appreciation of exhilarating performers and the composers who daily inspire them. This year’s program ranges from Haydn to Bartok, from Mozart to Ginastera, and includes much else in between. Of course there will be favourites by composers such as Brahms, Beethoven and Dvorak, but we hope to introduce you to something new as well such as the little-known octet of Niels Gade (1817-1890, friend of Mendelssohn and Schumann) to name just one.

There is still some work to be done before the program jigsaw is complete but we look forward to sharing the results with you in Mudgee from 21-25 November!

2012 Huntington Festival line-up announced

Our friends at Huntington Estate have been busy boasting about the line-up for the 2012 Huntington Estate Music Festival, so we thought we’d join in the fun and share with you some details of what’s coming up in November.

Musicians from ANAM

Anthony Marwood, one of the world’s great violinists, will share his renowned skills as soloist and chamber player. He will also direct a welcome return visit from the top string players of the Australian National Academy of Music, whose youthful energy and passionate commitment made them such a hit at the 2010 Festival. ANAM will bring with them the popular Australian cellist Howard Penny, whose exceptional career as a chamber musician has seen him awarded a Gold Medal for services to the Republic of Austria.

We are delighted to introduce the pianist Aleksandar Madžar to Mudgee. Sasha is more usually found lending his rare combination of sensitivity and brilliance to great European festivals, so we look forward to introducing him to the special atmosphere of this great Australian one!

Fiona Campbell

Two fine quartets will join us. The prizewinning young Ensō Quartet from the US received a Grammy nomination in 2010 and make their first Huntington visit. The Australian String Quartet will appear in its exciting new formation, with Kristian Winther and Steven King as first violin and viola. The delightful mezzosoprano Fiona Campbell will bring her compelling artistry to some classics of the repertoire.

Narek Arutyunian

Beloved pianist Ian Munro returns while the sparkling Andrea Lam makes her Huntington debut. Our line-up is completed by brilliant young clarinettist Narek Arutyunian, winner of the 2010 Young Concert Artists Award (previous winners include Ray Chen and the Tokyo String Quartet) amongst a fistful of other prizes. Information and tickets are available from Huntington Estate.

Meet Tafelmusik’s Alison Mackay

What is your role in the creation of the Galileo Project?

I’ve been playing the double bass with Tafelmusik since 1980 or so. Every year or two I’m lucky enough to be assigned a special project, working with the orchestra to put our core repertoire in a new context. In the case of the Galileo Project, I wrote a script, and working closely with our music director Jeanne, chose music to weave together with the narration. Then I worked together as part of a team with our designers and stage director to develop the visual aspects of the show.

How has the Galileo Project changed since it was first performed in 2009?

The excitement of playing the concert from memory hasn’t dissipated but the sheer terror has! We’ve performed the concert so many times now that the music is getting more imbedded. When we come to play in Australia we will have just premiered a new memorized project, so our first Australian concerts will be a good test. We also adapt the concert in small ways to reflect the country in which we’re performing.

How has the performance been adapted for Australia?

We’ll be introducing a few southern hemisphere images and a short reading from Ray Norris’s fascinating work on Aboriginal astronomy, Emu Dreaming. Our Canadian astronomical advisors have close colleagues in the scientific community in Australia. We are looking forward so much to meeting some of these friends and learning about the southern sky from them.

This is as much a piece of theatre as a concert. What challenges has this presented for the musicians?

We’ve definitely entered a new world of thinking about how we move and interact with each other on stage. Being freed from music stands has allowed us to experiment playing right out in the audience. Learning to walk and even climb steps while playing didn’t feel too easy at first! Of course I get off easy playing the double bass and pretty much have to stay put.

What was the first record you ever brought?

It’s a bit lost in the mists of time but I think it was a Bob Dylan LP.

What are you listening to at the moment?

I’m sorry to be so dull but I’m listening to nothing but the in-house recording we’ve made to help us memorize the music for our new project, “House of Dreams”.

We are all unbelievably excited to be making our first trip to Australia and can’t wait to arrive!

Alison Mackay during a performance of The Galileo Project

Carl Vine on The Galileo Project

The Galileo Project was premiered by Tafelmusik on January 9, 2009 at The Banff Centre in Canada, where it was co-produced as part of a residency. The very next day I received an email from pianist Piers Lane, who was working at the centre at the time, to tell me that Musica Viva simply had to get the show to Australia. Over the following weeks further endorsements trickled in from friends and collaborators in the broader international Viva family, and it became clear that Piers, as usual, was right.

A few months later we secured video footage of a performance, and it was immediately obvious that this was a remarkable concert event that Australian audiences deserved to see. It took the next few years to put all of the pieces in place to make an Australian national tour of The Project possible. We are about to enjoy the fruits of all this organisation.

Tafelmusik is a remarkable ensemble by any measure. Like most world-class chamber orchestras it has, in the person of Jeanne Lamon, a tireless and endlessly inventive director who is also a phenomenal musician. Less evident at first, hidden away behind a double bass, is Alison Mackay, whose uncommon skill at combining elements of theatre, literature and history with a passionate love of Baroque music has resulted in a string of extraordinary staged musical events that have placed the ensemble in a class without peer.

Previous spectacles devised by Alison for the Toronto-based group include a multi-disciplinary festival inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a multicultural creation based on ‘The Four Seasons’, and a musical celebration of Canadian architecture.

Professor of Astronomy at the University of Toronto, Dr John Percy, is an avid fan and long-term supporter of Tafelmusik who had followed these events with interest. He wanted, in 2009, the International Year of Astronomy, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s use of the astronomical telescope, and wisely reasoned that this should form the basis of the group’s next theatrical presentation.

The result is an amazing concert that opens with Shakespeare, Bach and Kepler, and wends its mesmerising way through centuries of musical, philosophical and scientific evolution, led by meandering musicians, an actor, and projected images whose impact is as astronomical as their content.

It is disarmingly easy to create multidisciplinary events that falter on every one of their axes. Tafelmusik hews the infinitely harder path, not just of making every component shine, but also of having the totality far exceed the sum of its parts.

Carl Vine
Artistic Director

Interview with Tafelmusik’s Alison Mackay

Alison Mackay, the creative force behind The Galileo Project, has played violone and double bass with Tafelmusik since 1979. She has developed a whole series of creative programmes for Tafelmusik, many of which have toured the world.

You have created many unusual programmes for Tafelmusik. What inspired you to create The Galileo Project?

I had been thinking for a while that it would be exciting to expand our experiments in “words-and-music” format to include some more theatrical elements and I was mulling over several ideas for themes. Then, in the spring of 2007, I received an email with an intriguing new idea from John Percy, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Toronto and an expert on variable stars and stellar evolution. On behalf of the advisory board of the Canadian division of the International Year of Astronomy, he proposed a concert in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s development and use of the astronomical telescope.

We approached The Banff Centre to see if the orchestra could develop its project at this cradle of creativity, and we received an enthusiastic response from them, which allowed us to plan in a more ambitious way, and to invite some of the most exciting people in Canada’s theatre world to participate.

How did you go about writing a script and choosing the music?

Researching and writing the script always goes hand-in-hand with choosing the music and the process usually takes about a year. I always work closely with Music Director Jeanne Lamon along the way to discuss the choices of repertoire. As you can imagine, there is a wealth of material to choose from – one of the hardest tasks is leaving out some of my favourites! Once the programme is chosen, librarian Charlotte Nediger prepares the music, transcribing some pieces from original sources, and making an integrated set of scores and scripts as well as individual parts for each orchestra member. Lucas Harris spent many hours reconstructing a lute concerto movement by Sylvius Weiss for which the orchestra parts have been lost.

The orchestra memorized the music for this show, which is extremely rare in the orchestral world.

Yes, because of the unusual theatrical aspects of this concert, the orchestra took on the monumental task of learning the music by memory – something orchestras almost never do. They worked hard in their own practice studios and got together many times to make informal archival recordings for private practice and to have “memorization parties.” Emails flew to share memorizing tips and to report progress.

The images projected during the concert are breathtaking. How did you find them?

We approached renowned theatre designer Glenn Davidson to collaborate with us as Production Designer. After he had completed his design for the lighting and set, featuring a 12-foot high round screen, Glenn and I met many times to choose the images. We were generously granted permission to use a collection of photos by Canada’s renowned astronomy writer and astronomical photographer, Alan Dyer. He and his colleagues at the Calgary Planetarium also offered the use of animated films about Galileo’s writings that they had made as part of a special programme about Galileo for the International Year of Astronomy. Drawing on these resources and the image and video bank of the Hubble Space Telescope, Glenn, Production Assistant Raha Javanfar and I worked at matching images to the meaning of the script and the emotions of the music. Projection Coordinator Ben Chaisson then programmed the images for our unusual round-screen format. Since the first performances of the project, we have been offered use of some stunning photos by Toronto astrophotographer Stuart Heggie and we have included several of them in later shows.

The premiere at Rolston Hall in The Banff Centre must have been both nerve-wracking and very rewarding.

The opening night was one of the most exhilarating and terrifying I can remember. Playing from memory and remembering the stage movements felt like a real highwire act, but the intimacy and beauty of Rolston Hall allowed us to feel the warm response of the audience. Present that evening were the members of The Banff Centre who had given so much to the show, and a group of astronomers, including James Hesser, the Dominion Observator, and Alan Dyer, whose images we had used. They were quite emotional at seeing their work set in the context of our music, and they gave a real gift to the audience by providing telescopes with which to view the moon in the dark Banff sky as Galileo would have seen it 400 years before.

What effect has The Galileo Project had on the orchestra?

A project about the wonder of the night sky, which is awe-inspiring for all humans, opens doors between the very specialized, Eurocentric world of our music, and people of other artistic traditions. Astronomy provides a common language which allows us to perform the music which is so important to us in new venues and contexts.

The theatrical aspects of the concerts and the memorization process have also allowed us to interact within the orchestra and with the audience in new ways, which is something we would like to build on in future projects.

Edited extract from an interview with Alison McKay, © Tafelmusik 2011

Tafelmusik in the Weekend West

Spheres of Influence
William Yeoman, Weekend West
28 January 2012

Listening to music of the past is like seeing the light of a star long dead. There’s that same sense of presence and absence you get looking at a photograph. So to combine Baroque music and projected images of the night sky with readings from the works of astronomers past in one magical concert is to experience joy tempered by wistfulness.

One of the world’s leading period instrument orchestras, the Canadian-based Tafelmusik, was formed in 1979 and is Baroque orchestra in residence at the University of Toronto. It regularly tours the world giving concerts and workshops, and its discography runs to more than 75 recordings.

Alison Mackay has played double-bass and violone with Tafelmusik since its inception. Her interest in education and multidisciplinary concert programming has resulted in such diverse projects as the children’s tale Baroque Adventure: the Quest for Arundo Donax, the multicultural creation The Four Seasons, a Cycle of the Sun, and a celebration of architecture and the arts Sacred Spaces, Sacred Circles.

In 2007, Tafelmusik was approached by music lover John Percy, professor of astronomy at the University of Toronto, with an unusual idea for a concert. Why not celebrate in music the 400th anniversary in 2009 also the International Year of Astronomy of Galileo’s first public demonstration of the astronomical telescope?

Mackay picked up the globe and ran with it. The result was The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres, which featured the music of Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Telemann and others, played from memory against a backdrop of high-definition images from the Hubble telescope, Canadian astronomers and astrophotographer Alan Dyer. Actor Shaun Smyth was also brought on board to recite the words of Galileo, Newton and Kepler.

Now Tafelmusik is bringing The Galileo Project to Australia for Musica Viva. To celebrate, they’ve included an Australian component.

“I wanted to include a component on Aboriginal astronomy,” says Mackay on the line from Toronto. “So I got in touch with Australian astrophysicist Ray Norris, who is an expert on the subject and who was extremely helpful. And Alan (Dyer) works quite often in Australia, so we have some wonderful images of the Australian night sky.”

However the basic structure of the original program remains, with the music orbiting around the twin suns of the Galileo anniversary and the some of the music performed as part of a month-long Festival of the Planets which took place in Dresden in 1719. The festival featured operas, balls and concerts in honour of each planet in the solar system, and Handel was one of the composers asked to contribute. So we have music from the time of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) and from the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727).

In Galileo’s time the relationship between the arts and the sciences was much closer than today’s; indeed, not only was Galileo’s father Vincenzo a famous lutenist and composer; both men experimented with mathematical formulas in relation to lute strings, while Galileo and his brother Michelangelo were gifted lutenists. A solo lute piece by Michelangelo is featured in The Galileo Project.

Some commentators such as physics and mathematics professor Mark Peterson, author of Galileo’s Muse (Harvard University Press) have even gone so far as to claim that “it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science”.

Astrology and astronomy were also virtually synonymous. And there was the concept of The Music of the Spheres, which Mackay says is another theme running through The Galileo Project. “Our program begins and ends with reflections on the ancient concept of the Music of the Spheres, thought to have been created by a heavenly ensemble of planets and stars making music together as they move through space.”

Mackay says the The Galileo Project has been an enormous hit, not only with concertgoers and school groups but with astronomers. “A lot of them come to the concert and are very moved to see the fruits of their labours heightened by music.”