If you’re reading this blog and you’re not from Adelaide, perhaps you are unaware of the tireless work of Creative Original Music Adelaide (COMA). I encourage you to read about them and follow them – they are a fantastic collective!
It was a privilege to be commissioned by them this year as Featured Composer for 2025. Below is a link to the livestream, and underneath that are the program notes that I shared on the night.
My first COMA experience was almost exactly 10 years ago, when I was a composition student at the Elder Conservatorium in 2015. Members of the COMA Committee Ensemble came to speak with our composition class and offered the opportunity for us to write a new piece for them to premiere at a COMA gig that November. I was very happy to take up that opportunity, and since then I have been involved as a Sound Alliance program participant (2019), an Exquisite Corpse project composer (2020), a presenting artist (2022), and now as Featured Composer this year.
I’m so happy that for this set I get to be an honorary member of the COMA ensemble with these three brilliant musicians who are also COMA committee members: Keira Simmons, Emily Tulloch, and Ciara Ferguson. Thank you!
Our set is based on the idea that, perhaps, we as ‘classical’ music appreciators/nerds have heard more names of women composers talked about in the last decade – it’s certainly my experience that more people in classical circles seem to be more aware of music by non-men than they were when I was first studying composition. However, talk is one thing, but actually hearing the tunes is another.
We begin with the iconic Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), German abbess and polymath. Ciara will sing Ave Generosa, and then Emily and I will riff into O Viridissima Virga.
Latin text and translation
Ave, generosa
Gloriosa et intacta puella.
Tu pupilla castitatis,
Tu materia sanctitatis,
Que Deo placuit.
Hail, nobly born
O Maiden, honoured and inviolate.
You are the piercing gaze of chastity,
You the material of holiness,
The one who pleased God.
❈────•✦•────❈
O viridissima virga, Ave,
Quae in ventoso flabro
Sciscitationis sanctorum prodisti.
Hail, O greenest branch,
Sprung forth in the airy breezes
Of the prayers of the saints.
Note – I much prefer to think of this poetry as referring to honesty, or transparency, rather than the outdated and problematic ideal of purity. This was the 12th century, after all…
After Hildegard, we then travel to the historical region of Occitania, which spans parts of modern-day France, Monaco, Italy and Spain. A Chantar M’er is the oldest surviving song composed by a woman troubadour (trobairitz) with both music and lyrics intact. Composed by Comtessa de Dia (fl. 1175), it challenged medieval gender roles with the *radical* idea that women could have independent thoughts about life and love.
Occitan text and translation
A chantar m’er de so qu’ieu non volria,
Tant me rancur de lui cui sui amia…
I must sing of what I do not want,
So bitter am I over the one I love…
Note – we will travel to I must sing of what I do not want via the beautiful South Australian composer Anne Cawrse’s How can I keep from singing? (And, if you’d like to hear that complete a cappella choral work by Anne, you visit the Adelaide Chamber Singers’ YouTube Channel)
Another note – this piece, A Chantar M’er, was the very piece that the COMA ensemble played in 2015! Thank you to Keira for extending it with your beautiful soundscape tonight.
Then, closer to home, our next piece pays homage to Australia’s first woman doctor of music, Ruby Davy, who studied composition at the Elder Conservatorium 100 years before I did. Ruby, Shine Bright was originally commissioned by Tura for the 2018 Summers Night Project, and my original program note is below:
In 2014, when I was in the second year of my Bachelor of Music in Composition, I was informed by the Elder Conservatorium that I had been awarded the Doctor Ruby Davy prize! I thought, okay, this is really exciting and I’m very honoured, but who is Ruby Davy and why is this prize named after her? Hers was a name I really should have heard of: a graduate of the Elder Conservatorium, Ruby Davy was the first woman in Australia to be awarded a Doctorate of Music, and 2018 was the centenary year of Davy receiving her award. No other non-man in Australia was awarded a Doctorate of Music for another 58 years after that.
In Adelaide, at the bottom of the uni library (Special Collections), there is a huge pile of Davy’s material, including recordings of a few original pieces, as well as lectures she gave. She speaks, and plays her music, very eloquently and forthrightly. I have digitised some of these recordings and have incorporated them into this work. The main intention of the piece is to celebrate Ruby Davy’s achievements, which are still extremely relevant today (the lack of gender diversity in university composition departments is still very much an issue). A lot of people don't know Ruby Davy's name, and those who do know her name, even within our University of Adelaide community, have generally never actually heard her music! I hope this continues to change.
In every production of art, whether music, architecture, painting etc., we recognise a threefold beauty: that of form, of character, and of idea. Feelings pronounced in music may express themselves in a lofty manner, that seems to elevate the hearer above the real and actual. In music, the innermost feelings of a composer are displayed.
Lastly, via more Anne Cawrse fragments, we reach our world premiere of the evening!
River Flow is based on a tune composed I composed in 2017 called River – originally a student and teacher cello duet, and also exists now as a short cello solo recorded on my album this year by Anna Pokorny. It’s been joyous to develop the melody into this quartet version for tonight that features so many magpies. They cannot keep from singing!
Thank you to COMA for commissioning this new work as part of this Featured Composer set for 2025 – I am so grateful for the support. Thank you to everyone for supporting original, live music ♥︎
