Become Ocean

Jen Winley
Conductor

Jen Winley is WASO’s 2022 Assistant Conductor.

Jen completed a Bachelor of Music in Percussion at WAAPA in 1999. Moving to Melbourne in 2000, Jen worked principally with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in percussion and timpani including international tours, and regularly with Orchestra Victoria. In high demand as a freelance percussionist, Jen also performed regularly with the WA Symphony Orchestra and as a guest musician for the Adelaide and Tasmanian Symphony orchestras.

As a conductor, Jen began her career in 2019 with the WA Youth Orchestra. In January 2020 Jen was a participant in the prestigious Australian Conducting Academy Summer School, run by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and completed WASO’s Emerging Conductors program in 2021.

Recently named as a rising star in the conducting world, 2020 saw Jen successfully debut as conductor with several orchestras in Perth including the WA Symphony Orchestra and Perth Symphony Orchestra. 2021 saw repeat engagements including her live film conducting debut of Home Alone in Concert with WASO.

In 2021, Jen founded Banksia Ensemble; a flexible chamber orchestra designed for early-career professional orchestral musicians and for the promotion of works by underrepresented composers.

Jen Winley's position is generously supported by the Simon Lee Foundation.

James Ledger
Conductor

James Ledger is a composer with a breadth of work spanning solo, chamber, electronic and orchestral music. He has held residencies with the West Australian, Adelaide and Christchurch (NZ) Symphony Orchestras, the Australian National Academy of Music and the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. He has received commissions from Australia’s leading ensembles including the Melbourne, Sydney and Tasmanian symphony orchestras, the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Australian String Quartet.

James has collaborated with songwriter Paul Kelly and released two ARIA award winning albums: Conversations with Ghosts (2013) and Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds (2019). He has won APRA Art Music Awards for three orchestral works: Viola Concerto (2019), Golden Years (2011) and Chronicles (2009).

He is Chair of Composition at the Conservatorium of Music at The University of Western Australia.

For more information please visit jamesledger.com

Benjamin Northey is unable to perform this concert as originally scheduled due to travel restrictions resulting from COVID-19. We are grateful to Jen Winley and James Ledger for joining us tonight.

West Australian Symphony Orchestra

From the centre of Perth to the furthest corners of the state, we have provided the soundtrack to life in WA since 1928.

As the State Orchestra, Perth’s first and finest, WASO is the largest employer of performing artists in Western Australia and reaches two million people with musical experiences each year on stage, in our community, and online.

From concert halls to classrooms, hospitals to aged care, we bring joy, inspire learning, and nurture participation in our community, because everybody deserves the opportunity to experience live music. Every year, through community and leading industry partnerships, we engage a new generation of young and emerging artists to help secure a bright future for music in Australia.

We celebrate our rich classical music heritage with great artists from all over the world and commission and perform new repertoire to renew and expand it. The Orchestra collaborates widely with major arts companies and independent artists, performing opera to ballet, movies to musicals, jazz to rock. We champion the diversity of music in all its forms, with a team of talented and passionate people who create unforgettable experiences for all West Australians to enjoy.

Asher Fisch is Principal Conductor and Artistic Adviser of our Orchestra and we are proud to call Perth Concert Hall home.

Western Australian Youth Orchestra

WA Youth Orchestras is a non-profit registered charity providing unparalleled orchestral training and performance opportunities for young Western Australians and our audiences. Since 1974, WAYO has been committed to the long-term investment of engaging and enriching the lives of WA’s youth through music. Our family of orchestras, ensembles and initiatives build a supportive community environment encouraging self-esteem, discipline, teamwork, leadership and performance skills to develop and flourish. Our programs highlight works of historical, educational and cultural value, creating an experience for our members that nurtures their creative education whilst being representative of the community and culture they exist within. WAYO is one of Australia’s leading and most comprehensive youth orchestra programs, with over 400 members drawn from 137 suburbs in Perth, South West WA and beyond.

Each year, WAYO presents diverse, innovative and impactful concerts to live audiences in excess of 30,000. Our rich performance history has made us a stalwart of WA arts and culture, whilst also facilitating performances throughout London, Prague, Berlin, Mannheim, Brussels, Paris, Singapore, and Hyogo through our committed international touring program. The past decade has seen WAYO enjoy increased exposure to guest conductors of international standing through our Woodside International Conductor Season. This exchange program revolves around the inclusion of various international guests who bring a unique perspective to the rehearsal space, facilitating education and understanding through cultural and musical enrichment. These fine conductors build on the fantastic work of all of WAYO’s music staff lead by WAYO’s Music Director and Chief Conductor for over 30 years – the inspirational Peter Moore OAM. Cultural exchange is explored in many ways throughout our concert programming. 2021’s Spirit centred on a collaboration between Australian Indigenous and Western musics; originally commissioned by the Darwin Symphony Orchestra [2019], the principal work Yuwani was a spectacular convergence of the work of renowned Numbulwar musician Don Nunggarrgalu and celebrated Australian composer, Lachlan Skipworth. “The results are (sic) goosebump inducing, blending the original song’s flexible rhythmic and harmonic language with the tonal palette of the Western orchestra [review: Seesaw].

Other performance highlights include: becoming the first youth orchestra in the world to perform with Maestro Ennio Morricone in a sell-out performance at Burswood/Crown Theatre for the 2012 Perth Festival (one of the most successful in the Festival’s history), being the featured orchestra in Perth Festival’s 2016 opening Home to an audience of 30,000, performances with music theatre star, Lucy Durack, jazz vocalist, Grace Knight, and iconic pop band, The Whitlams, as well as the Joondalup Resort and Leeuwin Estate Concert Series’, and ten consecutive annual seasons of a large-scale, outdoor concert in Burswood Park [2008-2018]. In addition, WAYO presents its renowned sell-out Children Concerts and Outreach Concerts to facilitate educational exchange, learning, and mentorship. Since 1985, Perth’s favourite children’s orchestra concerts have been delighting young people and their parents in the thousands every year. In these well-beloved ‘Babies Proms’, WA families are given the opportunity to learn and interact with a real live orchestra.

A key focus area of WAYO is developing new initiatives to support the evolution of arts and culture in Western Australia for the benefit of our members and broader community. The Carol Day Commission has been designed to offer a female-identifying Australian composer the opportunity to write, rehearse, and perform a large-scale orchestral work in a high-profile performance setting, whilst maintaining creative autonomy. This commissioning award, now in its third year, allows our members to glean knowledge from living composers with underrepresented voices, and exposes our audiences to new and innovative orchestral music that speaks of our time. New to 2022, the Merge initiative nurtures interdisciplinary collaborations between WAYO and other creative industries to further the cultural and performative experience of our members. The first of these collaborations, Rite & Revolution, received “a huge ovation” [The West Australian] with anonymous audience survey feedback praising it for being “thrilling”, “inspiring”, “unique”, and “uplifting to say the least!”.

Our side-by-side collaborations with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra give our members the opportunity to share a stage with WASO, learning and performing within the context of a professional orchestral environment. Beginning in 2005, this uniquely beneficial program is slated for annual recurrences from 2021-2023. Western Australian Youth Orchestras is an organisation of “abundant promise” [The West Australian], and we can’t wait to share with you what’s next.

Olivia Davies (b. 1988)

In Waves­

In Waves is based on the process of a pendulum wave. As a starting point, the piece takes this process and applies it in ‘slow motion’, generating independent layers of recurring sound that fade in and out at discrete intervals. As layers are introduced, sounds gradually accumulate and distort in ever-changing combinations, giving way to an airy soundworld before ultimately realigning at the end.

I was inspired by the generative nature of the pendulum wave and what that could mean musically. With sounds recurring at different durations, any sense of pulse is subverted and our ears are left to explore the different instrumental colours as they unfold, shift and align. The stasis and movement of sound therefore became the focus of the work, and the title In Waves is a reference to the slow oscillations of a pendulum and what I imagined that would sound like. While the music follows a strict process, I sought to create a suspended and, at times, contemplative work free of anticipation—a meditation on the individual and collective colour of sound.

Olivia Davies is WASO's Composer in Residence, and is generously supported by Prue Ashurst.

Image: Alexandra Cohen

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, Op.33a

Dawn (Act I)
Sunday Morning (Act II)
Moonlight (Act III)
Storm (Act I)

Peter Grimes made Britten’s name as a musical dramatist. In this, his first full-scale opera, the young composer turned out a masterpiece.

Britten and his partner Peter Pears were visiting California in 1941 when Pears bought a copy of the works of poet George Crabbe: like Britten, a native of Suffolk. An article on Crabbe by E.M. Forster in The Listener alerted Britten and Pear’s attention to The Borough, the poem by Crabbe upon which Peter Grimes is based.

With financial assistance from the Koussevitsky Foundation, Britten and Pears began to sketch out a scenario for Peter Grimes before leaving America in 1942. They fleshed it out aboard ship, and on arrival home in England called in a librettist to write the words. Britten began to compose the music in January 1944. In June 1945, Sadlers Wells decided to reopen their North London theatre with this work, and it was premiered there on 7 June of that year.

Britten was fascinated by the sea, and particularly his native coast. He once wrote: ‘My parents’ house in Lowestoft directly faced the sea, and my life as a child was coloured by the fierce storms that sometimes drove ships on our coast and ate away whole stretches of neighbouring cliffs.’

But The Borough didn’t just provide Britten with opportunities for musical portrayal of the forces of nature. Britten and Pears found something to sympathise with in the human drama of the protagonist Peter Grimes and his isolation from his community.

In Peter Grimes, the orchestral writing is particularly substantial. The Four Sea Interludes, entr’actes or preludes in the opera, are effective concert pieces. Although they comprise some of the most effective portrayals of the sea in all of orchestral literature, they are also riven with the emotion which makes Grimes a very human drama.

Dawn appears in Act I, after the Prologue’s coronial inquest has established that Grimes cannot be held culpable for the death by drowning of his young apprentice. The high flutes and violins suggest almost uncannily the cold glassy greyness of the sea, or of a deserted beach; the swirl of harp, clarinets and violas an encroaching wave, while a brass chorale suggests, perhaps, the swell, with even, at one point, a note of menace.

The tolling of Sunday morning church bells is rendered most effectively by the overlapping clashing pairs of French Horns in Sunday Morning, the beginning of Act II in the opera.

Onstage, the repose of Moonlight is ironic. Another of Grimes’ apprentices has died by misadventure, and already the audience senses that Grimes is steering unavoidably towards tragedy. Arnold Whittall calls this ‘one of Britten’s most subtle nature scenes, a night-piece shot through with luminous shafts of moonlight.’

Stage directors can founder on attempts to render a visual analogue to Britten’s highly effective Act I Storm; it is sometimes best to leave the curtain down. The storm here is also a mental storm, a musical postscript to Peter’s outpouring of anguish and lonely confusion to his friend, Balstrode.

Gordon Kalton Williams
Symphony Australia © 1997/2008

John Luther Adams (b.1953)

Become Ocean

Over the years my orchestral music has gradually become simpler and more expansive.

Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (1991-95) contains four different musical textures. In the White Silence (1998) has three. For Lou Harrison (2002) reduces this to only two. In Dark Waves (2007), I finally got to one. When I first heard that piece I began to wonder if I could sustain a similar sound for a longer span of time. The result is Become Ocean.

The title is borrowed from a mesostic poem that John Cage wrote in honor of Lou Harrison’s birthday. Likening Harrison’s music to a river in delta, Cage writes:

LiStening to it
we becOme
oceaN.

Become Ocean is a meditation on the deep and mysterious tides of existence. All life on this earth emerged from the sea. And as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that we may once again quite literally become ocean.

I wish I could be present to hear this performance, not only because it is the Australian premiere of Become Ocean, but also because the West Australia Symphony Orchestra is joined by the young musicians of the Western Australian Youth Orchestra. At this perilous moment in human history, I work with the next generations ever most in my heart and mind. They, now, are the hope of the world. It is they who will lead us out of the darkness of our own making, into new ways of living in harmony with the earth, and with one another.

– John Luther Adams

Image: Pete Woodhead

2022 signifies the second year of the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra (WASO) and the Western Australian Youth Orchestra’s (WAYO) 3-year partnership focused on building talent pathways for local musicians in Western Australia. The partnership provides a foundation of unique training opportunities for the artistic and professional development of the next generation.

WASO and WAYO throughout the year regularly come together for a series of workshops supporting WAYO’s concert preparation. These talented musicians are provided with rare access to WASO, strengthening the pathway for them to excel as professional musicians in the future.

Each year, a mainstage event showcases both orchestra’s at Perth Concert Hall. In these performances, young WAYO musicians are paired with WASO professional mentors as they perform side by side.

In 2021, WASO and WAYO delivered two performances of Dreams of Place, a concert inspired by Perth Festivals 2021 theme of Bilya (river). Amongst an accompaniment of iconic works from the orchestral canon individually exploring place, the event was highlighted by the commissioning of two new works, setting traditional First Nations songs and stories for orchestra, featuring special guest performances by Noongar man Barry McGuire and Bibbulmun woman Della Rae Morrison.

The partnership between WASO and WAYO benefits West Australian’s through delivering unparalleled opportunities for developing youth musicians to continue to grow and integrate into a professional environment. This helps ensure that world-class orchestral music that contributes to the cultural vibrancy of our state can be enjoyed by many generations to come.