“To be human” program note
Carl Vine has an extensive and varied portfolio, including eight symphonies, 13 concertos, music for film, television, dance and theatre, electronic music and many chamber music and piano works. He was born in Perth, and completed a Bachelor of Music majoring in composition at the University of Western Australia. In 1975, Vine moved to Sydney, working in many varied contexts as a freelance pianist and composer, including accompanying and later composing for the Sydney Dance Company, as well as co-founding the new music performance ensemble, Flederman. From 1980-1982 Vine lectured in Electronic Music Composition at Queensland Conservatorium of Music, followed by a sabbatical in Toowoomba, Queensland, before moving back to Sydney in 1985 to become resident composer at the NSW State Conservatorium. Vine was the Artistic Director of Musica Viva Australia from 2000-2019.
Piano Trio: “The Village” was written in 2013, and was commissioned by Julian Burnside for Musica Viva in honour of Vine’s 60th birthday. It was premiered by Sitkovetsky Trio in Newcastle in March 2014. The following program note, written by Vine, appears in the front of the score:
Recent studies suggest that we have evolved to function best socially in groups of no more than 150 people. We tend to stay in regular contact with just a few individuals within these ‘villages’, and cope poorly with much larger crowds. This put me in mind of the limited number of people I stay in touch with frequently, and how my life experience transforms with each contact. This notion first arose as I pondered how to design a composition without any of the usual landmarks. How could the music remain coherent without the recognisable boundaries of “movements”, without a central stockpile of major themes, and without the formative principle of exposition, development and recapitulation? What emerged is a village of ideas, cast as twelve independent episodes that explore unique combinations of small musical thoughts that are related but not identical, and which evolve organically within each episode, and as the episodes bounce off each other. A network of musical interconnections develops, spanning the whole work, that parallels the webs of relationships that make up the ‘villages’ of our lives. Although the architecture is intentionally loose, the episodes relax in energy and tempo near the middle of the work, and intensify towards the end.
Carl Vine Musica Viva Australia 2012 ICS Sydney May 2011