In the Pipeline
The AAO is all about new music and, as such, there are always groundbreaking projects and ideas being developed alongside our existing repertoire. Find out more about these developments here at 'In the Pipeline'.
AAO Summer Music Camp
An annual Summer Music Camp will be conducted in partnership with Northern Metropolitan Institute of TAFE (Fairfield Campus, VIC). Held over four days in February, it will take students from Years 9 to 12 and tertiary students to Year 2.
While it will be inaugurated in Victoria, the aim will be to expand the camp into other states while methods of enrolling interstate participants will also be investigated.
An International Guest Artist will be a feature of the camp.
Draft Purpose Statement: “To provide life formative experiences in music for youth aged between 15 and 20 through coming in contact with professional musicians who have reached the highest level in musicianship and are able to strongly relate to youth”.
Date: January/February 2010
Prince of Darkness
The Australian Art Orchestra returns to its jazz roots with a stunning new musical work inspired by the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. Widely considered one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century, Davis was at the forefront of almost every major development in jazz from World War II to the 1990s. Prince of Darkness explores this extraordinary oeuvre through new arrangements of seminal Davis works, a performance of the original Gil Evans composition Sketches of Spain and a new work by Anthony Pateras commissioned especially for this project.
Program Birth Of The Cool Black Comedy (new arrangement: Paul Grabowsky) Nefertiti (new arrangement: Phillip Slater) Spanish Key (new arrangement:TBA) Sketches of Spain: Concierto De Aranjuez (featuring Phillip Slater: Trumpet and John Rodgers: Guitar) New work commissioned from Anthony Pateras
Featuring the whole Australian Art Orchestra
Premiere: Melbourne International Jazz Festival, May 2010 Place: Melbourne Town Hall
Read more about Anthony Pateras
See Anthony perform
Three Auto-Concerti
Written by three composers, Paul Grabowsky, Sandy Evans and Scott Tinkler to feature their own unique talents in three concertante, with the full weight of the 19-piece Australian Art Orchestra surrounding them.
All works will be world premieres.
Soak
Soak is a live music and film event designed for indoor, quality acoustic and staging environments which features the work of composer Alister Spence (AAO piano), Super 8 film artist, Louise Curham, and the musicians of the Australian Art Orchestra.
Soak slowly unfolds through composed influences which include Arvo Pärt, Górecki, Brian Eno, Radiohead, Dust Brothers and Miles Davis. It will be performed as an extended ambient work featuring an interaction between the AAO and a quartet drawn from its ranks comprising, piano and samples, trumpet and samples, double bass and drums. The quartet will work with both written and improvised ideas.
Soak provides an aural and visual space for the audience to inhabit through its use of sampling, groove, slow moving structures, texture and repetition.
Date: 10 October 2010 (75th birthday anniversary of Arvo Part)
Rain
Rain will be a major music theatre work based on a short story by Somerset Maugham, and is being developed in collaboration with NZ festival director, David Malacari, for AKII. Rain will have a strong Pacific focus with a Polynesian cultural component and a New Zealand librettist and Paul Grabowsky will write the score with the assistance of his Melbourne Prize, awarded in 2007. The work will feature the whole Australian Art Orchestra.
Bloodstream
Bloodstream is the realisation of the third stage of a collaboration with Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach Ruby’s Story and Kura Tungar: River Songs and Stories being the earlier stages. It brings together the parallel themes of stolen children and stolen water by drawing comparisons between the life of a stolen child (Ruby Hunter: born by a billabong, rubbed in warm ashes and held up to the moon in her grandfather’s hands) with the degradation of the River Murray and the greater Murray Darling Basin catchment area. It is a multimedia, music theatre work which explores new ways of story telling by combining dramatised film segments and documentary footage with live music, songs and narrative.
- Crossing Roper Bar
- Signal Art Ensemble with the AAO
- City of Women
- Hard Core
- Into The Fire
- Kura Tungar: River Songs and Stories
- Meet Me in the Middle of the Air
- Passion
- Ringing The Bell Backwards
- Ruby's Story
- Theft of Sita
- Shorelines
- Testimony: The Legend of Charlie Parker
- Soak / The Hollow Air
- Two Ducks Swimming
- Miles Davis: Prince of Darkness
- Five Elements
