A special Composer Conversation with Australia Ensemble UNSW Geoffrey Collins and Australian composer Carl Vine.

Geoffrey and Carl have been working together for over 40 years, first performing together professionally in Flederman, an Australian contemporary music ensemble in 1978.

Listen to Carl Vine's work Café Concertino on our YouTube channel.

Transcript

0:00 Introduction

Geoffrey Collins: Hello, this is Geoff Collins. I’m flute player with the Australia Ensemble UNSW here at the University of New South Wales.

Today I’m going to be in conversation with the distinguished Australian composer Carl Vine. This year we had hoped to perform an important piece in the Ensemble’s history - I’m about to ask Carl what he thinks about it – but it’s an important piece for us, Café Concertino. It’s one of our most successful early commissions, it was written in 1982? 83?

Carl Vine: 86, actually

GC: 86! Alright, and we had programmed it in our series this year. One of the great advantages of the Ensemble of course is that we can revisit some of our successful commissions and this is one that has been a favourite through the years and has travelled around the world, not just with us. It’s really taken on a life of its own. Welcome, Carl.

CV: Thank you Geoff.

01:00 History of Flederman and the Australia Ensemble UNSW

GC: You and I have known each other for quite a long time. We were just talking about it.

CV: More than four decades, yeah. *laughs* Round it off.

GC: And perhaps the audience members wouldn’t know that we actually played together in a completely different kind of ensemble, entitled ‘Flederman’. Would you like to just talk a little bit about that, and the differences you think between that and writing for a kind of more mainstream group like the Australia Ensemble UNSW?

CV: Flederman was set up as a group to play music, modern music by living Australians. And it was founded in 1979, originally as a sextet and then we formed a quartet, of which you were a member.

So, there was you and me and Simone de Haan and Graeme Leak, based in Queensland at the Queensland Con, and over a period of 10 years we commissioned 79 new works and premiered those works.

And the distinction then with the Australia Ensemble UNSW which you joined, and you were in both groups at the same time, was the Australia Ensemble UNSW had this really large catalogue of existing chamber works, but then was commissioning as well, and I was very lucky to be one of the early commissionees. And so, I’d written a couple of works for Flederman before that.

Working with the Australia Ensemble UNSW really wasn’t very different because everybody in the Ensemble knew living Australian composers, had played a lot of contemporary music, and indeed you were the, at that time the champion modern flute player of Australia. Fortunately, a lot of your students now I think have taken that role. It’s not you anymore!

GC: That’s true.

CV: So, it wasn’t very different, and the ethos was the same, so there was no particular aesthetic within Flederman. We just wanted music that was challenging and interesting. And it was the same with the Australia Ensemble UNSW and its commissioning.

03:05 Carl as performer and a composer

GC: When I first knew you, I thought more of you as a performer I suppose, in the way that you and I interacted and we played together for many years, a whole variety of music. How did you think of yourself at that point, and at what point did you transition in your own mind to thinking ‘I’m actually going to really concentrate my efforts into composition’?

CV: I took up piano when I was 10, I played brass instruments from the age of 5. Piano from the age of 10, and at that point I saw some Hollywood movies about the life of composers, it was probably George Gershwin, and in this particular film he wrote his own piano concerto and performed it, which was all imaginary.

But that was my vision, that I was going to be a composer-performer, I was going to write a piano concerto and I would play it. So, I did that not quite in that sequence, it didn’t quite happen that way.

But through the 70s and the 80s, I was a composer-pianist, and I had that view of myself. I had quite a lot of composing work outside the ensembles, I was just starting to work with orchestras, but I’d worked with dance companies for ten years by 1985 and completed more than 20 dance scores. Some, a couple of orchestral ones, large chamber ensembles in which you also played and were recorded, a great mixture of works.

 So, for me, I was both, but certainly our time together, and we worked very closely with Flederman for, what was that? About eight or nine years. So yes, I was definitely.

GC: Things swung around though, didn’t they? You started to develop a more great presence as a composer.

CV: Well, what happened was by the end of Flederman’s time and basically our government funding was cut, and so the group had three years of advance plans that were just shattered, and it was at that time I was to write my first major piano solo.

And I thought ‘I’m going to give up playing’, because every time I tried to write a piano solo, I thought of myself in the role as the pianist, and it was an inhibition. And so, when I thought ‘I don’t have to learn this’, all of a sudden I could make it much harder than I ever had before, and think that there’s some other silly bunny who’s going to put all the hard work in and learn all the dots. And that was my first piano sonata which since then, and that was 30 years ago, is probably my most resilient calling card around the world.

 And so, it needed for me to think ‘alright, that’s it, I’m now a composer’, and make that leap. But at the time of Café Concertino, and in fact you did play it, the Ensemble played it for about 8 or 10 years, and once on tour, and I remember there was a tour in 88, and I think David Bollard was ill and you asked me to come and play it at Carnegie Hall and I couldn’t. *laughs*

GC: That’s right!

CV: That was one of your better concert tours.

06:22 The story and success of Café Concertino

GC: When we premiered this work in London we played two concerts in London, early in the 80s, one in Wigmore Hall and the other one on the Southbank there, and it was, the critics described the piece as “one of the most finely wrought pieces” they’d heard that season, and was very complimentary about the performance.

So, it made an immediate impact on people around the world and it became a very easy piece for us to incorporate into our regular programming. It fitted our instrumentation.

Did you find any difficulties in writing for the instrumentation of the Ensemble as it stood at that time, six players?

CV: It was a bit of a stretch in that the Ensemble is not quite balanced. You’ve got to be very careful with the balance and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

Basically, the string playing is underwhelming compared to the piano and the wind parts.

And I kind of thought of the – it was a string trio at that time, and not a string quartet – the string trio as a kind of backing group.

But the concertino part is it was a little concerto for piano, and so it was definitely a focus for David Bollard who was playing it then. But then with flute and clarinet – I can’t remember, do you play piccolo as well?

GC: I play alto flute in the slow movement…I can’t remember about the piccolo.

CV: I don’t think there was piccolo. But anyway, high flute and clarinet all over the place. So, it was really those, and the strings have a more supporting role, there’s very little, which they weren’t terribly happy about, but…

GC: I’ve heard about that.

CV: Yes! I have a vague memory of it. But yes, absolutely, a showcase for the piano and for the ensemble as a whole. But I think basically if you keep the piano quiet, the string trio plus two winds is a well-balanced ensemble, that works well. So, it’s really finding a sort of balance between the two.

GC: Well, certainly it’s very effective for our combination of instruments. I must say I had the unique impression, because I had worked with you on another piece, an earlier piece in Flederman days, called Miniature III, which is for the rather different combination of flute, cello, percussion and piano, and for me, I could hear echoes or continuations of some of the rhythmic ideas that you had created in that piece.

Do you think there’s a flow through there from some of the Flederman rhythmic ideas and complexities, into the more main concert hall sound of the concertino?

CV: They are definitely related works, and the next work I was commissioned for Australia Ensemble UNSW was Miniature IV. So Miniature III was a Flederman work and originally it was for trombone not cello, so that’s a weird combination of flute, trombone, piano and percussion which we did a massive tour of America with that quartet. And the balance is actually much easier there because the, particularly in its high register, the flute balances out the other three and you just tell the trombone to be quiet most of the time.

But yes, there are a lot of similarities and at that time in Flederman we were playing a lot of Elliott Carter, and so he was a massive influence on my writing and on my playing, and he used a lot of the same rhythmic devices that are in both of those works, and in Miniature IV which was some years after that.

GC: I think that appealed to your undergraduate degree with mathematics as part of it, is that right?

CV: yes, well my lack of a degree in mathematics, but yes. There was, I studied Science at university and there’s a lot of actually very simple algebra in musical rhythmic manipulation. But it is in both works, more so in Miniature III but that is a strand through all of my music actually, since then.

GC: Yes, I notice the way that your pieces are planned and the structure of them, and I can see your mind mathematically working in a way that perhaps is not, you know, it’s not intrusive or necessarily discernible, but do you enjoy planning pieces, to write pieces like that?

CV: Yes, it was interesting that before this interview I was re-reading the program note which I wrote 35 years ago, and it reminded me of the way the work was constructed and it’s worth pointing out that C-A-F-E, the café in Café Concertino, is the key centres of the work, so the first section is in a nominal C major, the next one is actually in A, and then F sharp and E flat alternate in the third one. So, the F sharp and E flat give you the é in café – the E with an accent is the E flat.

GC: And you skilfully managed to give it a kind of bubbly café quality at the same time through its bouncy rhythms and a lot of articulation and motoric stuff from the strings.

CV: And I very much enjoy the fact that there was this overtly and very carefully calculated academic approach to the structure, and yet it’s just fun. And I did want that bubbly, fun character. Most of the first section is in 7/8 so has this sort of lilting syncopated quality to it, and then a slow middle section, but to keep that character of, a bit whimsical throughout, just with a slow thing in the middle.

12:13 A comparison of Café Concertino to Miniature IV

GC: How would you compare that when we moved on to Miniature IV? We had an extra player – that probably changed your view of the sound of the Ensemble at that point, and that is a different piece.

CV: It is a very different piece.

GC: A different sound world. And when you came back to it, how did that feel?

CV: It was difficult, and I think I said after Miniature IV I don’t want to do any more for this group, because I didn’t want to do anything I’d done. I didn’t want it to be, you know, the “Café Concertino, oh he’s doing that again”. And so, I had to find a set of different rules to tie the thing together.

And Miniature IV is simply not as effective, it doesn’t have the bubbliness, it doesn’t have such a formal structure, which was intentional, but it didn’t kind of replace those things with anything very tangible. So, it was less effective.

Meanwhile that was the start of my orchestral career and so I was doing a lot more orchestral work and larger ensembles. And so, then I found the six or seven players a bit limiting.

13:20 Mainstream vs experimental

GC: Do you feel, having taken that journey into the more mainstream performing ensembles, do you miss where you started from, in the more experimental avant-garde sense? Do you feel kind of in any way constricted by that? Or has it liberated you?

CV: Neither - that was then, but it’s interesting that groups like Flederman don’t exist anymore.

There were a number of groups around Australia and around the world - Fires of London was just about to be dismantled as well, which it was – and so all of those mixed chamber groups kind of outlived their usefulness. And the public appetite, we had regular audiences of 300 at the Opera House with this crazy group of six musicians and all recently written music, it was insane.

But there was an actual hunger and desire for it, and that is not there anymore.

GC: In a wider sense, do you perceive that in a cultural sense across other artforms as well?

CV: Well, I’ve confronted that working for Musica Viva, for the previous 19 years; I’ve stopped now.

And looking at this very staid, sort of nineteenth century focused chamber music approach with modern music thrown in, and I think that is an incredibly healthy thing to do, and what we’ve forgotten is that the time that Beethoven was writing his string quartets, for instance, old music didn’t exist. Everything was new and before 1800, you know, all the concerts, every concert program was 80% new music.

GC: The ink was still wet on the page.

CV: The ink was still wet, every time.

And it was only by the time - Beethoven wrecked the whole thing, just by writing music that was so good everyone wanted to hear it again and again, and this was a completely new thing. It had never happened before. Looking at today then, I think having the classical canon with contemporary content is really valuable and really important.

GC: I often think that people’s view of music is perhaps a little bit different to other artforms in terms of painting, the other artforms, literature even. Sometimes it seems as though people’s expectations of what music should be is a little bit different to what those other artforms – how do you experience that as a composer when it’s fed back to you, people’s reactions to your music?

CV: It actually makes me quite sad and you listen to Jackson Pollock, for instance, and he talks about rock and roll, and so this is one of the great minds of modern plastic art, visual art, and his reference is Elvis Presley, or rock bands.

And there is a disconnect, and it is because of rock and roll in fact that this commodification of music took place, and so the market for music in the fifties slowly just revolved, and it’s all about sales. And classical music, no matter how much value it has culturally and historically, simply does not attract the same sales and so we are living in this era of insane economic rationalism.

16:44 Music consumerism

GC: Yes, I think the medium of recording has made a huge difference to people’s understanding of what music is, and what they want from it, and their control of it. They can have the Berlin Philharmonic at home with their dinner party, and they can have it turned down to 2 on the … they can have loud music, “oh that’s a bit loud, I’ll just turn it down a bit”.

CV: Mahler as background.

GC: Mahler as background music, which I found a very bizarre thing, but people do, and it’s sort of… whereas I don’t know if you have a Jackson Pollock on your wall, you can’t really do anything with that. It’s going to be a Jackson Pollock on your wall, isn’t it?

CV: Yeah, hopefully an original and not something your child did by accident.

GC: But it’s a bit more, you know, ‘there it is’, and it stands as an artwork, whereas music has come to be, now that it’s not just that you go to concerts to hear it but you can have it in any kind of form you like, it’s much more of a commodity that you can manipulate and control.

And that’s a change for composers and for performers I think, to remain relevant and to be interesting. And unfortunately with the video clip, we’ve seen what that’s done to pop music – it’s really kind of wrecked it in a way if you don’t, for a lot of it, so how do you approach that going forward as a composer.

CV: Well, I basically ignore it because it’s too easy to get wrapped up in that.

And the other problem is that most people only hear, let’s say, orchestral music in film scores, and film scores now have become recycling grounds for Mahler and Holst and really fairly staid nineteenth century music, and this is people’s conception of orchestral music when our education system is really failing to deliver any options.

18:42 Music and the brain

GC: Yes, what is music training, what is it about? It seems to be more about kind of entertaining students rather than actually developing skills or abilities and critical thought via music.

CV: Music students make much better academic students than those who don’t study music, that it helps in everything – the socialisation, there’s pattern recognition, language, invention, all of these things, and particularly if you are playing an instrument, the two halves of your brain have to work together all the time.

And they have discovered that practicing musicians have a thicker corpus callosum, so next time you see a professional musician say “my, you have a thick corpus callosum” which is the membrane between the two halves of the brain.

GC: Ok. I’ve learnt something Carl.

CV: And because the two halves have to work together. And so there is this view that, you know, of ‘what’s the point of studying music, there are no careers’ – well, first of all, there are careers, all sorts of them; but also, it helps in every other way the function of your brain.

GC: Yes, unfortunately I don’t think that’s widely understood.

CV: It is not widely understood, or indeed known, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many times you say it.

20:00 The new Carl

GC: You spent a very distinguished time as Artistic Director of Musica Viva and you not so long ago have relinquished that post. How’s life been for you since then, and what are you occupying yourself with? Do you get up in the morning and think ‘oh my god, what am I going to do today?’ or composition projects? What’s life, this new version for Carl?

CV: The new version, well. It was only about three months after leaving Musica Viva, which was about a year ago, that I realised that I had lost this weight on my shoulder.

And it’s a remarkable company, and I feel very fondly for it, but I felt responsible for a lot of its activity for nineteen years. It was a fourteen-million-dollar annual budget, so it’s big bikkies, and kind of every decision I made would have serious ramifications including to the lives of other musicians.

I wasn’t so involved with the education program, a remarkable education program, but this sense of obligation and not screwing up the subscriber base and keeping the ticket sales high, but also keeping the company vibrant and artistically interesting, and pushing forward all the time, and after about three months of not doing that I finally realised – it’s not my burden anymore.

GC: You were able to let it go?

CV: Oh yes.

GC: Was it difficult to let it go?

CV: No. The first couple of days was “oh, I’m not doing that”, as you expect…

GC: ‘I’m just going to get on the phone and find out what they’re doing about this.’

CV: I was happy not to do any of that, but as with most things these days it was all on emails, so the email traffic took a big dive.

So, the first thing is yes, this sense of relaxation and yeah, actual joy. Not that I didn’t enjoy the work, it was just great to not have to do it.

So, I’m teaching more now at the Sydney Conservatorium; I’ve been on one-third Senior Lecturer in Composition, so that’s gone to a half.

I’m keeping up the composing, and I can’t remember how many pieces I completed this year, but there’s a, that keeps going quite happily.

GC: So, what new works should we look forward to, that are coming up?

CV: Well, I cannot release a concerto for piano four-hands, which I think is very good, but the commissioner is an American group and they have the right to first performance and they are having trouble of course finding a first performance.

GC: Of course, that’s true. It’s a challenge.

CV: So hopefully that will happen next year, but I can’t release, I can’t actually say anything about it until they perform it. So that’s the big one.

22:50 Composers in COVID-19

GC: So how are composers affected in general by COVID, do you think?

CV: Well, it’s just everything has kind of in abeyance, everything is waiting and so I had, last year I finished my fourth piano sonata and once again that pianist had the right to perform it for a year. Well, that year was up in July, so they had to have another year.

GC: Yes, of course.

CV: So that also is kind of waiting. And commissioners don’t really know when to commission, they’re not sure when the performance is going to be, so I’ve had a couple of contracts where it will be ‘oh, in 2023 we’ll feel safe about that’. So, it’s like everyone else, it’s been a bare time.

GC: I guess it’s a chance for reflection and tidying up. Do you do a bit of tidying up? I know composers spend a lot of time re-editing and patching up things and doing tying up loose ends.

CV:  Lots of them do *laughs*. I always do my tidying up about a month after the first performance and then, that’s it, done. What I have been doing is a couple of little sort of pet projects. I wrote a couple of grade pieces for harp, because Alice Giles was reworking the harp syllabus for the Australian Music Education Board and she said, “oh, have you got anything?”, and I said “I’ll write something”, and that was fun.

GC: Nice!

CV: And so those sorts of little things.

GC: Things that don’t need a performance.

CV: Yes. But in fact, are incredibly useful.

24:22 Being useful

GC: Well, that’s a very good thing for both musicians and for composers to be useful, isn’t it?

CV: It is. And I in fact should take this time to write some grade pieces for violin and viola and cello, because I’m sure there are not enough Australian works in those, to in fact match the flute sonata which is still on the syllabus all the time.

GC: Ah yes, talking of pieces that has travelled around the world and is way gone past, which you very kindly wrote for me and it’s now an absolute hit, you know. It’s set in competitions all around the world. So, music like yours takes on a life of its own – it’s nothing to do with you or me or the ensembles for whoever we played it for. That’s a fantastic thing to see.

CV: Well, there’s occasional works that enjoy that status but not…

GC: Well, flute players are desperate for something good to play, we’re always looking for good sonatas.

CV: I gave a talk to the composition cohort at the Sydney Conservatorium and I went through and added up all of the works that I’ve written, and there’s 135 of them, including I think 42 orchestral works and four piano sonatas and six string quartets and it goes on. And I thought that’s an incredible amount of work, there’s got to be at least four that will live on. *laughs*

GC: You’ll keep going, adding more just to be sure of the mathematical probability.

CV: Yes, I’ll just increase the probability with each year.

GC: Carl, it’s been a great pleasure to have you come into the campus at UNSW today, and it’s always wonderful to chat and hear your fantastic mind at work, and discover a little bit more about your music and we thank you for coming.

CV: It’s great, it’s been wonderful catching up, Geoff.