Me in the recording studio today, recording my Michael Nyman album All Imperfect Things.  

I was in there for a long time. There are no windows, and we can’t have the airconditioning on because it makes too much noise.  So it kinda gives you cabin fever… but in a good way.

Two more days and I’ll have done all the recording. Then the editing begins (and the writing of notes/booklet and the photoshoot/cover-art and… wow, we’re not even halfway there!)

Perfect Day by Colin Towns. From the soundtrack to an animated series Tales of Beatrix Potter.

It’s performed here by Sara Macliver and Sinfonia Australis and it makes me feel nostalgic, because it’s the very first professional recording I ever did…

Ksenia Bashmet plays Michael Nyman’s “Digital Tragedy”. Mr Nyman’s own performance of this piece on the “Enemy Zero” OST is at least twice as slow, so I suspected something was up. I asked him if it was a typo in the commercially available score. He laughed. Of course it is!! So, folks, if you’re going to learn it, it goes at about 70bpm, not 170bpm *giggle*  I’ll be recording the correct tempo, cos I’m a nerd who does her research ;)

That said, I quite like Ms. Bashmet’s speed version. It’s really rather compelling.

I love my hometown, Canberra.  I love it so much, I’m giving them a very special concert of a rather exclusive repertoire.

Earlier this year, I had the great privilege of performing some of Mr. Philip Glass’s as yet unpublished Solo Piano Etudes in a concert for Perth International Arts Festival, including a world premiere.  He’s given me special permission to perform them, such a rare and wonderful gift.  A gift I’m passing on to the lovely people of the nation’s capital.

Can’t wait!

I’ve been getting a lot of less-than-lovely opinions on my decision to record an album of solo piano music by Michael Nyman.  eg.

“Pfft. He’s a lightweight. Second rate.”

“Isn’t it better with the rest of the band?”

“So you found something to like about him, eh?”

I am reminded of the opinions of which I bore the brunt during my preparation for my Philip Glass album Mad Rush.  There was quite a lot of derogatory talk, and a bit of jealousy.  It kinda hurt at the time, but the album still did pretty well for me, and won me an ARIA so… meh. I’m taking all this as a kind of good omen.

Haters gonna hate.

Only a few more days to vote in the ABC Classic FM Classic 100: Music in the Movies.  And I’ve another suggestion to make… Gabriel Yared’s soundtrack to the film Betty Blue. I love this soundtrack so much, I recorded this track from it C’est le Vent, Betty.  And I wrote about why I made this choice in the digital booklet for the album….

“It’s all about the choices we make, isn’t it?  Someone who made consistently pretty bad choices would be Betty (Béatrice Dalle) of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 film Betty Blue.  I’m sure that many of us imagine ourselves reacting to bad news in the extreme.  Just think how good it would feel to punch that boss you hate square in the face, abuse that unfaithful ex-boyfriend/girlfriend in front of their current flame, rip out the vocal folds of those hideous screaming kids next door.  Of course you would never ever act upon these crazy fantasies, but this is where you differ from Betty.  Suffering from an unspecified mental illness, she has no filtering mechanism between appropriate reactions and dangerously inappropriate reactions.  However, she also has moments of genuine fond connection with her long suffering boyfriend Zorg; the piano duet they play, C’est le Vent, is such a moment.  Pity they had to have this moment in the piano shop in the middle of the night, disturbing the neighbours.”

When I first mentioned that I was to include Claude Debussy’s Claire de Lune from Suite Bergamasque on my second album The Good, the Bad and the Awkward many wrote to me excited that I was including a tribute to the Twllight  films.  I apologise to those people.  It has nothing to do with sappy teenage vampires.  It’s a tribute to that wonderful Hollywood blockbuster Ocean’s Eleven (2001).  There’s something quite seductive about this film, super smooth Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his motley crew of clever crooks whom we are manipulated into liking.  We know that stealing is wrong, but we know too that people who run casinos are crooks.  Plus our thieving crook friends in this film are so human, so fragile, so damn likeable and have genuine affection for each other. The casino bosses are just plain greedy.  After the big heist, watching the Las Vegas fountain dancing under the flashing lights with ecstatically beautiful music by Claude Debussy, anyone would be forgiven for thinking our crooked friends were kindhearted modern day Robin Hoods (except for the fact that they keep all the money for themselves!).

Time Lapse by Michael Nyman, from his soundtrack to the peter Greenaway film A Zed and Two Noughts.  Performed by the Michael Nyman Band.

Pure baroque’n’roll.  I love bizarro wanky PoMo stuff like this.  Can’t wait to record the solo piano version of this (it really works).

Creating sound worlds, this is what I do for a living.

Mostly I create ephemeral sound worlds that come and go in real time.  Sometimes I have the great privilege of creating permanent sound worlds, recorded as data, a collection of moments frozen in time that will be around forever.  Or at least, for as long as the technology to replay it survives.

I’ve blogged before about the fine work of my very special colleague Virginia Read - she’s the engineer who worked on my first two albums (Mad Rush  and The Good, the Bad and the Awkward ).  I’ve learnt so much from her over the last couple of years not only about the actual process of recording, but the importance of focussing on the details of the sound we create.  You’d think that recording solo piano albums would be a simple thing for an highly experienced classical music engineer of her calibre.  I’m sure it used to be a simple thing before she met me.  Ha!

On my first album Mad Rush the producers asked me if I wanted to record on a Stuart and Sons piano, an incomparably wonderful piano made locally by Wayne Stuart.  It has a wider range of pitch (102 keys!!), a much wider range of dynamic and colour and an evenness of tone across the range the like of which is unparalleled on any other instrument I have ever played.  Ever.  This presents the recording engineer with quite a task - how to capture this range?  Virginia and I took several hours to find the right place to put the piano in the hall and the right place to put the microphones. Several hours and several different setups.  We ended up putting a pair of mikes quite close to the strings, almost like a pop music recording, plus two microphones behind me (It’s called pianist perspective recording) and then mixing the results together.  The recording has an intimacy about it because of the closeness of the 1st set of mikes to the strings.  Also, the ‘pianist perspective’ mikes make you feel like you’re standing close to where I’m playing, rather than out in the hall seeing a performance from a distance. Here’s an example of the sound we created, the title track Mad Rush. 

On my second album of music from the movies The Good, the Bad and the Awkward, I took the lessons I had learnt about sound and, well, became more demanding with what I wanted.  I think Virginia relished this opportunity to be a bit creative in the recording process (at least I think she did… at any rate, she never complained!).  I requested three different piano sounds for three different kinds of repertoire.  

1) A proper classical sound as if the listener were at a recital in a concert hall (for example, this Satie from The Painted Veil) 

2) A close miked pop music sound, as if the listener were in a small studio with the pianist (for example this Angelo Badalamenti from Twin Peaks)

3) A sound that we called “pop minimalism” which was exactly half way between these two sounds. (for example, this Yann Tiersen from Amélie)

I then also had all my toy instrument tracks, for example The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  by Ennio Morricone.  I played all the instruments which we overdubbed to make an occasionally cacophonous noise.  We didn’t use a click track like the pop musicians do.  For those not in the know, a click track is basically a metronome that the musicians have on headphones whilst they’re recording their parts for overdubbing.  Virginia and I did it with something called internal pulse… i.e. I can actually count! ;)

Virginia somehow then magically wove all these different sounds into a single seamless listening experience.  I was so impressed (I still am!) and she totally should have won that ARIA award for which she was nominated.  She worked harder than any pop engineer would ever even know how to work!

Now I’m about to record my third album All Imperfect Things, an all Michael Nyman offering.  I’ll be recording on a Steinway piano, which is the kind of industry standard instrument.  To be frank, it has much less range/scope than the Stuart and Sons piano, but on the other hand has a much warmer and fuller sound overall.  I did consider going with the “pop minimalism” sound that we used on my last album but I’ve realised that won’t work at all.  The closer you put the mikes, the less dynamic range you have to play with.  Loud playing can overload the proverbial system.   More distant mikes, as in the bona fide classical sound, give you the opportunity to play both louder and softer.

Additionally, there is the problem of contrast within Nyman’s music.  Dynamic contrast is created in his music almost entirely through texture.  Rather like various sorts of dance music (techno, house, electro etc.) you make it ‘louder’ by adding instruments/tracks and make it ‘softer’ by taking them away.  The Michael Nyman Band who play exclusively his music are as close to a rock band as a classical ensemble can get.  There’s very little in the way of dynamic subtlety in their playing, it’s either ‘on’ or ‘off’…. and this is the joy of it!  Check out the band, they really do rock.

However, it presents a solo pianist with a problem.  How to create the contrast with a limited amount of textural variety written into the piano arrangements?  The rock’n’roll sound seems appropriate when all the other instruments are in, but I will need to play with much greater variation in volume and colour to create the same effect all by myself as a solo pianist.  Plus, to effectively record that contrast, I’ll need to go with a far more traditional recording technique (the ‘proper classical’ I mentioned above).  Either that, or we could try the Mad Rush sound, but of course it will be different to that again because it’s not a Stuart and Sons piano.

Do other pianists go through all this turmoil when making a recording? I wonder….

A world exclusive performance of Etude No. 19 by Philip Glass played by Australian pianist Sally Whitwell.
Recorded by ABC Classic FM at the Perth Concert Hall on Saturday 16th February as part of the 2013 Festival of Perth.
Read the article on Phillip Glass on The Music Show.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, well ***drumroll*** the whole of this concert I played in is being broadcast on ABC Classic FM this coming Wednesday.  Hip hurrah!!

It’s a New Day!  Or it could be, if classical musicians would more often get their hands a little dirty…

It’s a New Day words and music by Junior and Intermediate choristers of the Woden Valley Youth Choir (WVYC) with Sally Whitwell.  Performed by the kids themselves, live in concert, September 2012.

This song is the result of a composition workshop I did with these great kids from WVYC.  Alpha Gregory, their powerhouse of a conductor, invited me to come and work with them in Canberra last April.  It was a beautiful time of year, gorgeous, russet/autumnal tones and a crispness in the air that you just don’t get in Sydney *sigh* and I thought to myself, why not write a piece about Canberra’s heart, Lake Burley Griffin?  I was born and bred in Canberra and am sick to death of Australians “Canberra bashing”, but I’m not going to get angry about it, I’m just going to say positive things about the lovely city that is our nation’s capital through some beautiful music.

Here’s the text that the kids wrote.  I think it’s just fab.

Something’s starting to stir,

Excited for what the new day will bring!

It’s a new day!

Sunlight pours over the mountains

Reflections mirrored on the crystal blue

Boats in the icy water, drifting away,

Spreading ripples in the fountain spray.

It’s a new day!

Swans so elegant drifting by

Cormorants basking in the midday sun.

New bird-call, I look for the caller

Rough bark of a silver birch on my skin.

It’s a new day!

Happy and free, laughing in the sun all day,

Fire in the sky, I want to fly, I want to glide away.

It’s a new day!

[Image Canberra Sunrise by Richard O’Neill]

Well, the dust has finally settled.  Following the obligatory post busy period flu, I’ve come out the other side pretty much unscathed. Time now to gather together the lessons I’ve learned from Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) and Famous Spiegeltent at Arts Centre Melbourne.  I’m looking to the future.  Exciting times. Times of potential change, that is.

I like to think of what I did at PIAF as a “residency”, even though they didn’t publicise at such.  The big ticket item was a concert with Philip Glass.  He and Maki Namekawa and I performed his complete Piano Etudes, all twenty of them in a row, which was great! I’d never played to a crowd that big before (well, not as a soloist) so the buzz was pretty amazing.  It was particularly wonderful to work with Mr. Glass.  After all, nothing like hearing it from the proverbial horse’s mouth!  The most valuable lesson I learnt was about being a composer and the importance of finding the right balance between allowing performers to interpret your compositions and ensuring they follow your instructions.  Mr Glass gave me a great deal of leeway as a performer to create the kinds of musical shapes I feel when I play his music.  I’m a little more pedantic and fussy than that when I compose, but I’m inspired by him to try a slightly freer approach in the future. Stay tuned.

PIAF is also involved in running the Great Southern Festival, a kind of satellite event that tours some of the main festival acts to regional centres south of Perth.  I performed a concert in the Albany Entertainment Centre, a completely different program of tunes from my two solo albums.  Whilst the Philip Glass Complete Etudes concert in Perth was a more traditional and formal performance, this Albany concert gave me the opportunity to be a little more informal and friendly/chatty.  That is, I can be completely myself in this kind of performing context and I love it!  I like talking to my audiences about the music, why I choose the repertoire I play, what makes it special to me.  Generally I find that if I play it more like some pop musicians play a gig, with a bit of chat between, that the crowd are more likely to come and speak to me afterwards.  They don’t feel intimidated or distanced, they can see I’m a human being and that I like meeting people.  Keeping Classical Music Friendly.  It’s my tag line after all!

Whilst the concerts were super exciting and fun and spoke to a great number of people, perhaps more important and life changing for me were the workshops I presented.  I felt extraordinarily lucky to have been given basically free reign to do whatever I wanted to do with these bunches of kids.  Although I did plan specific activities, lots of it went completely out the window as soon as the kids were there.  I find this often happens, the best laid plans discarded, because you never know what kind of imagination or knowledge or experience level the group is going to have.  Anyway, only two kids turned up to the workshop in Albany (out of about 8 who were meant to be there).  The organisers were sweetly apologetic - “Oh, you don’t need to do it if you don’t want to, we’ll find them something else to do…” etc. I could’ve let it go, but I am very proud to say that I didn’t let it go.  I ran my workshop and between the three of us, we wrote a abstract micro-opera of body and voice percussion complete with characters, dramatic structure and choreography (my original plan was quite different, to workshop a composition about the history of the local whaling industry and rugged coastline!).  I was incredibly proud of the result and challenged myself to work more abstractly with the group in Perth the following day.

The Perth workshop was much simpler.  I had additional help from two of the PIAF Youth Ambassadors, Chrissy and Krista, two lovely young go getters specifically attached to the Classical Music program who were happy to muck in the the kids a bit (hooray!!).  Fine initiative from the festival, I must say.  Anyway, I did a good deal more experimentation with my writing-an-abstract-micro-opera workshop and was thrilled that the kids were able to create something so dramatically compelling in the space of three hours.  It was a kind of revelation to me, that by presenting people with extremely tight musical parameters I could facilitate the creation a piece of musical theatre by this fairly disparate collective of unique individuals.  Only one thing disturbed me and that was hearing some of the PIAF staff talking about how difficult it was to find artists/performers who were also happy to do workshops.  Amongst the Classical Music performers, there were really only Masterclasses and Artist Talks offered.  *Yawn* I mean, they’re all great performers but they’re preaching to the converted and that does nothing for the future of classical music. Reinvent or perish, things needs must change! More on how I plan to do that later ;)

Anyway, there was little time for basking in the glory of my PIAF appearances, I was due at the Famous Spiegeltent in Melbourne to perform something quite different again.  Following my failure to gain professional theatre experience at the Opera, Arts Centre Melbourne offered me this superior opportunity to create my very own solo theatrical experience.  Hooray!  It was not so much a steep learning curve, more of a sheer cliff face really.  I wrote myself a show, a kind of ‘dramatised recital’ that’s somewhere about halfway between Meow Meow and Hahn Bin, all about why I chose to become a musician and not a ballet dancer. I wrote my own script, I played some pretty tough bona fide classical repertoire, I sang some reinvented pop songs, I acted the various characters, I danced some ballet, I played toy instruments with a stompbox livelooper, I enlisted my artist friend Pamela Lee Brenner to create a magical plastic+astroturf garden for me to play in, behind a corps-de-ballet of plastic dolls.  My director friend Leonie Cambage helped me to being all these elements together into a seamless whole. It was exhilarating!  It was also exhausting.  But I feel that I’ve created a new performance genre for myself, something that could bring classical music out of the concert hall and into people’s lives a bit more easily - it’s a whole lotta things at once, a recital, a cabaret, a piece of musical theatre, and it’s immediate, it’s intimate, it’s about choices and that’s something that everyone can identify with, isn’t it? I think so.  

The result of all this mental hydra headed activity is that I now have these three wildly different ways of performing (formal recital, informal gig, crazy cabaret) and I have these different styles of creative workshops that I can present (songwriting, musical theatre composition, cabaret/performance creation).  I’ve defined them and put them out there (here and here).  In the perfect personal Utopia of my mind, I see myself doing little residencies here there and everywhere with people who sign up to get a whole week of Whitwell *grin*  Everyone who attends will compose, perform, create, workshop, discuss…  Plus they’ll get to enjoy a couple of concerts from me too as an added extra bonus.

Music for the People!!  I think I can do it. I really do.