Reimagining Musical Programming Symposium, Day 2. Discovering the Intangible Spirit
Discovering the Intangible Spirit of Place through Musical Performance in Historic Spaces (Matthew Stephens, Neal Peres Da Costa, Graeme Skinner and Jakelin Troy).
Whether an old house, public building, or traditional meeting place, historic sites are often places where music has been made and consumed. Contemporary music making within these spaces is rarely purposed to explore the specific past of the place, and while it is common for music ensembles to perform historical repertoire, this rarely bears any relationship to the contexts of the site. In a series of musical research projects and concerts, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Sydney Living Museums have developed programs using locally composed, or owned, repertoire for performances at the historic Elizabeth Bay House, in Sydney. The positive response to these performances from both musicians and audiences within this historic site has identified the potential for reimagining programs using a combination of historic repertoire that has associations with a particular site, historic instruments, and provenanced scores reflecting interpretative practices to help capture the spirit of a place. What can we learn from a concert held in a small Victorian room on a hot February afternoon, where a sweaty audience flicks away the insects, and a clock chimes above the fireplace, as peculiar repertoire composed in Sydney leaks into every crevice of the house? In this round table session, we address a series of targeted questions prompting discussion about the scope of this approach and its possibilities in engaging audiences through historic repertoire and challenging Australian understanding of the musical canon.
Dr Matthew Stephens is Research Librarian, Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection, Sydney Living Museums (SLM). Matthew leads the interpretation of the history of domestic music in SLM’s house museums and was Australian representative in the Sound Heritage network (UK), 2015-16. He has collaborated with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, on numerous projects including as convenor of SLM’s Sound Heritage Sydney in 2017. In 2019, Matthew curated the “Songs of Home” exhibition, Museum of Sydney, and contributed to “Sound Heritage: Making Music Matter in Historic Houses”, Jeanice Brooks, Matthew Stephens and Wiebke Thormählen (eds.), Routledge, 2022. Neal Peres Da Costa is Associate Dean (Research) and Professor of Historical Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is a world-recognised performing scholar on historical keyboards, lauded for his monograph Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-edited performance editions of Brahms chamber music (Bärenreiter Verlag), and award-winning (ARIA 2008) and practice-led recordings. He was lead chief investigator on Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP170101976, and is currently leading DP210101511 and DP220101596. He performs with several leading Australian music industry partners and is Artistic Advisor to the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra.