Category: Essay

Let me tell you a story.  No, let me show you one. No, again: let me sew you one. So you won, says the boy to the ocean who laps at his castle of sand; never mind, I will build it again. So they dance, this pair of unlikeliest lovers, always different and every time […]

There is a phrase in new music—the colloquial kind, one of those oral indexes traded among colleagues in post-show chatter and off-hand remarking, a shorthand signifier loosely comprehensible but sparingly specific—that goes: “This is a music that teaches you how to listen to it.” Implied in the phrase, though never said outright, is a patience […]

1987 was a somewhat innocuous year for new music. Neither Orwell nor the Berlin Wall, it straddled the change-years, when the high-rollers of ‘60s and ‘70s European music slowed, gradually uncovering a younger, less stodgy, more disseminated and global avant-garde. Europe as an idea—though it wasn’t sure how yet—was under considerable revision, and the aesthetics […]

If I say it’s an experiment, you might think me overeager to abdicate on certitude’s authority. So I won’t say that. What I will say is that a report seemed inadequate to the scale of what took place. ELISION Ensemble—Australia’s premiere new music group, ranking members alongside Austria’s Klangforum Wien, Germany’s MusikFabrik, and France’s Ensemble […]

It’s been 40 years of counting tuplets together; at this point, Daryl Buckley and Peter Neville just talk over one another. Constantly. The conversation looks and feels something like this: So how did the two of you come to know each other? Neville: “Well, we met at VCA!” Buckley: “Yep, right.”  “And was that in […]

As if the uphill battle ELISION faced was ever in doubt, two reviews from the first concert on a small New Music festival in Melbourne in October of 1986, on which Daryl Buckley played Milton Babbitt’s “Composition for Guitar.” Neither reviewer is much impressed with the work, a reminder of how far New Music criticism […]