My Heart performance notes
Forest Collective presents
My Heart
Saturday 19 Oct 7:30pm
Eleventh Hour Theatre, Fitzroy
Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country
Program
My Prussian Blue Heart for pianist, tarot cards, and piano (2017, rev. 2024) movement 1 – Danaë Killian
Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 (1910) – Arnold Schoenberg
Möbius for solo piano (2012) – Howard Dillon
Asphyxed (1991) – Christine McCombe
My Prussian Blue Heart movement 2 – Danaë Killian
The Seventh Centre (1992) – Amelia Barden
Birth Music (2006) – Colin McKellar
Two Minds: Four Pieces for Solo Piano, Op. 73 (2004) – Gregers Brinch
Sikinnis III (2015) – Evan J Lawson
My Prussian Blue Heart movement 3 – Danaë Killian
Artist
Danaë Killian piano, performer and curator
Event Partner
Eleventh Hour Theatre
A portion of the proceeds from this performance will go towards the creation of an album of My Heart with Move Records
Forest Collective acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we live, meet, create, and perform this performance, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and extend our respects to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, past and present. We recognise and respect their cultural heritage, beliefs, and relationship with the land. We recognise Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of this nation.
“Nights I wander the world’s city streets, looking for you and talking to you, my heart.”
Danaë Killian
My Heart is the response of a 21st century expressionist pianist living in Naarm to Mein Herz (My Heart), a novel-in-letters written by German poet Else Lasker-Schüler to her husband Herwarth Walden while he journeyed through Scandinavia. At home in Berlin, Lasker-Schüler published the letters in Herwarth Walden’s magazine Der Sturm, in the very season of 1911 that the composer Schoenberg moved to the city. Fantastically light-hearted in style throughout, Lasker-Schüler’s My Heart: A Novel of Love, with Pictures and Really Living People poignantly becomes a narrative of grief as she realises that Herwarth, on his travels, has been unfaithful to her. In My Heart, Lasker-Schüler gathers round her the leading artistic figures of Berlin’s coffee house culture, and wraps the richness of their creative spirits around her breaking idealistic heart like an unction-soaked, exotically coloured bandage.
My Prussian Blue Heart is inspired by Lasker-Schüler’s My Heart in undisclosably mysterious and largely symbolic ways. In three aleatoric and improvisatory movements, the piece works with an expanded concept of musical composition and pianistic performance, which includes creative writing, words spoken out loud, and acts of listening to the imaginative resonances within and between tarot cards. The mother text is a hybrid of musical notation, instruction booklet and prose poem. Words spoken out loud in tonight's performance are chosen from the mother text, which is mostly the original creation of the composer, with some Lasker-Schüler quotes used here and there.
There is not one piece on today’s program that is not indebted in some way to the groundwork laid by Arnold Schoenberg in his epoch-making Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11. These pieces remain extraordinary, compelling, and challenging more than a hundred years after their composition. Tonight we can experience how Schoenberg’s impulse, which in the early 20th Century was a wrestling-with-death process, was destined to become a birth-giving process.
- Danaë Killian
Mobius is a moto-perpetuo type piece and forms part of a suite of solo piano works written over the last few years. The form of this work is relatively simple: As the name suggests the piece returns back on itself relentlessly, one could say obsessively, to the gestures and structures presented at the beginning but never quite repeating exactly until final disintegration.
- Howard Dillon
Christine McCombe is a Naarm-based composer, digital artist, writer and lecturer in sound and music composition. Of her work, McCombe says: “I think music should aspire to create a space for contemplation. Every piece of music I write or work that I create strives for this in different ways but a common thread is the strangeness and beauty of human experience …” (Australian Music Centre).
Originally a classical oboist, Amelia Barden performed in numerous ensembles in Australia and Europe before turning her attention to composition over 20 years ago. Her love of story and context has led her to collaborate with artists working in contemporary dance, theatre, film and installation, and finally to focus on composing for screen. Amelia creates both subtle and dynamic original music, which permeates the depths of storytelling.
Birth Music was written Fifteen Years ago around the Birth of my Daughter, Nora. This presentation has been slightly revised and re-scored. The work uses Bell Ringing Charts superimposed over chord progressions from early Jazz Standards; there is a story to my happening upon both sets of charts. The scale associated with the chord, responds to the number order in the permutations, within the specific bell chart being referred to at the time. That material is then interpreted vertically and horizontally, into the structural architecture of the composition.
- Colin McKellar
Encouraged by fellow composers Dimitri Schmirnow and Elena Firsova I approached the composing of these pieces with a degree of freedom that I had not attempted before. The meeting with these two wonderful composers was very inspirational indeed – I had always had the attitude that I would not compose in an atonal idiom unless I felt the need for it. In this case, the pieces are not necessarily atonal but I feel as if I encompass a free atonality in the music. These pieces seek to combine a feeling of lyricism with a soundscape-like quality in addition to the contrasts of character that are inherent in the juxtaposed themes and voices which are to be understood as human/divine characteristics.
- Gregers Brinch
Sikinnis III (2015) follows from two previous works for solo flute (2010) and flute, viola and harp (2013).
A sikinnis is a vigorous dance performed during a satyr play in ancient Greece theatre. These dances are strongly associated with the half-faun character of satyr’s and generally explore hyper-masculine, male fantasy. In my works titled Sikinnis I am generally exploring the idea of dance, joy and sexuality. In these pieces I generally contrast two musical ideas with different aural outcomes, and to me, emotional experiences. In this third Sikinnis I’m most interested in the muddy, almost overly resonant textures, as at the beginning of the piece. To me there is a fascinating melancholy in the sustained sounds available with use of the piano pedal. Generally these moments arise from the lower register of the piano to then focus on more hyperactive rhythms. This is contrasted with higher register material which is less rhythmically rapid and more focused on melody, line and a sense of sparkly-ness. There is a third element in block chords, which help form a basis for the ongoing resonance of the piece.
- Evan J Lawson
