Everyone that dedicates their life to music has a pivotal moment where they first fell in love with performing. Is there any moment in your life that you can recall being a catalyst for your love of music?
Music was a very important part of my family life growing up in rural northern New South Wales. As a kid I had a lot of chances to do little performances on whatever instrument I was learning at the time, and we also went to see lots of bands play in little community halls in the villages around where we lived. Those events were so fun and inspiring, and I don’t think I ever really considered doing anything other than playing music for a living!
What drew you to the cello as your instrument of choice? What do you think is the instrument’s most magical quality compared to, say violin, viola and double bass?
Some say that the cello most closely matches the range of the human voice and I think that is something that appeals to me. I also find that cello is such a versatile instrument – I can cover bass lines, comp chords, sound like jazz or heavy metal, as well as playing the beautiful singing tone of classical cello.
You’re the principal cellist of Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra. Can you give us some insight into what makes Camerata unique and what your role as principal cellist entails?
Camerata holds a beautiful place in the cultural life of Queensland as an incredibly versatile and creative unconducted ensemble. As we have no conductor, this means that each musician participates and engages in the music-making process. This is an empowering model and really brings out the joy and aspiration of music-making which can sometimes be lost in the traditional orchestral model. Each musician can make an artistic impact on the sound and how we connect to our audiences and that is a huge part of why I love working with Camerata. We have a wonderful main stage series which is performed in the QPAC Concert Hall (where we often play the more traditional string orchestra repertoire, but also experiment with newer work), perform with the Queensland Ballet and for Queensland-based festivals like Brisbane Festival and Queensland Music Festival – but something I also love about Camerata is the culture of risk taking and creativity, exemplified in projects like our recent residency in 2021 at the Museum of Brisbane where players improvised and composed musical responses to artworks in the exhibition ‘City In The Sun’. As it happens, we’ve been invited back for another residency which is currently in the works.
We’re excited to catch Camerata playing with sensational First Nations performer Emily Wurramara at Brisbane Powerhouse in early October. Can you tell us a little bit about how this collaboration came to be?
Our artistic director Brendan Joyce worked with Emily Wurramara in 2019, in a project called ‘Chamber Landscapes: A Brief History of Time at Ukaria’ for Adelaide Festival. This connection led to Emily joining Camerata for one of our main-stage concerts in Brisbane in 2021, where Emily sang some of her original songs Ngarrikwujeyinama and Yimenda-Papaguneray arranged for chamber orchestra, as well as ‘Hear Me and Remember’ (by Leah Cotterell and John Rogers). It was an incredible experience to play with Emily, so it’s wonderful to be catching up with her again for a full-length concert with our wonderful partner and neighbour, Brisbane Powerhouse.
Without giving too much away, we’d love to know more about how the evening’s performance will take shape. Can you give us any insight into how Emily and Camerata mesh on stage and the kind of journey audiences will be taken on?
We will be playing some of Emily’s previously released songs, some of which we performed in 2021, which will be accompanied by freshly written string arrangements by Camerata’s long time collaborator Michael Patterson. Emily will also be singing some as-yet-unreleased songs, so we’re very excited to be a part of that journey! The rich sonority of strings works so well with Emily’s gorgeous voice, and she sings in both English and the beautiful Anindilyakwa language of Groote Eylandt and Bickerton Island.
You have keen interest in fostering respectful intercultural collaboration. In what ways do you feel chamber music (and, perhaps, classical music as a whole) can connect with other cultures and grow via musical collaboration?
I think at the heart of every good collaborative musical endeavour is a solid friendship, and music is a result of that shared understanding. For me, being a classically trained musician in Australia is only part of the story. Music is socially located, and our society carries the legacy of colonisation and migration, so these realities are necessarily reflected in the classical music tradition of here and now.
We also hear you love to support the work of up-and-coming composers, particularly women and non-binary composers. In what ways do you see this next generation building upon and evolving the art form?
I was a part of a wonderful concert recently for the Brisbane Music Festival called Defiant Women (the program curated by soprano Bethany Shepherd) which was entirely made up of works from the baroque era written by women, most of whom I had never heard of. This was an important reminder for me that women’s music has always been there, we’ve just been missing out all this time! So much incredible work has been done in this space and social expectations for programmers have definitely shifted, even from a few years ago. Representation (of not only gender, but cultural and linguistic diversity) is something audiences expect, and our music is the richer for it.
Finally, we’d love to know what song always brings a smile to your face?
Hard question! So many songs! But I’m so very excited to be playing with Emily Wurramara again, so Yimenda-Papaguneray is on high rotation for me (and my kids) right now.
Emily Wurramara perform with Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra at the Brisbane Powerhouse on Thursday October 6. You can grab some tickets from the Brisbane Powerhouse website.
