One of the frustrating things about being a musical performer outside the all pervasive popular or rock genres is that invariably one gets stuck with the label “classical musician” with all the negativity this can entail. The US music critic Alex Ross commences his book “Listen to This” with the following sentences:
- “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name. It traps a tenaciously living art in the theme park of the past…The phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype. I wish there was another name.”
I could not agree more! I feel very much a part of a contemporary, tenaciously living art form and do not believe that I belong in a museum – or at least no more than a 65 year old rock musician touring the world playing the “revolutionary” music he or she was famous for circa 1969…
Members of Mara! with The Marais Project
But if conventional classical musicians – those who play in orchestras and in string quartets or piano trios – are pigeon-holed by the “classical” term, how much more early musicians, those like me who have found their niche in the pre-Classical era, that is, in the music written before 1750?
Yet like many of my colleagues I don’t confine myself, my work, my collaborations or my listening habits to those the classical genre. I am just as likely to be at a jazz or improvised music venue on a Friday night as the Opera House. I constantly arrange music, have conducted school and church choirs and performed in restaurants, bars, school halls, coffee shops and recording studios as well as modern concert halls. In addition, I have commissioned and/or premiered more than a dozen new works while The Marais Project has collaborated with a very broad range of musicians and artists including:
- Jazz pianist and composer Kevin Hunt – who has written for us and improvised with us from the key board
- World Music ensemble, Mara!
- “The Early Dance Consort”
- Composers Rosalind Page, Matthew Perry, Stephen Yates, Paul Stanhope, Dan Walker and Christopher Keane
- Finally, earlier this year I performed a new work for two viola da gambas by young composer Alice Chance at the “HSC Encore performance” at the Sydney Opera house before two packed halls of 3000 young people
Some of these collaborations have really stretched The Marais Project and me personally well outside conventional comfort zones and have had the same effect I know on those we collaborated with.
At the completion of the partnership each of us tends to return to our specialty, in my case, viola da gamba music of the late 17th to mid 18th centuries, but we are never quite the same for the experience. Often we become friends and subsequently attend each others performances and work together in other ways.
The upcoming concert on April 29 with three members of the Mara! World Music group will turn the clock back several years to the first time we all performed together. The central work we prepared and presented on that occasion was a version of Martin Codax’s 13th century song cycle, “Cantigas de Amigo”. The arrangement included two viola da gambas – there was no such thing as a viola da gamba in the 13th century – and modern upright bass played by Steve Elphick, a musician renowned in the jazz world. I don’t believe what we created was classical music, but neither was it jazz or even world music. That is the wonder of collaboration – sometimes what emerges cannot be classified.
We subsequently recorded the whole concert for ABCFM and have released this recording on CD. In the months since the release some reviewers have “got it” but others remained a little bemused as to why we bothered to step outside the conventions.
Mara! meets Marais - CD Cover
In the end I can only speak for myself on this question. I think I collaborate to stretch myself and to keep from becoming set in my ways. I also enjoy meeting and working with those I admire from outside my field. I learn and so do they I am sure. On April 29 Mara! and The Marais Project will try again and see where we end up!
Jenny Eriksson with Philip Pogson
Mara! meets Marais
3.00pm Sunday 29th April.
Recital Hall West, Sydney Conservatorium, Macquarie St, Sydney.
Mara Kiek & Belinda Montgomery – voice & percussion
Llew Kiek -bouzouki & gittern
Jennifer Eriksson & Catherine Upex – viola da gamba
Tommie Andersson – renaissance lute & theorbo
Dave Ellis – double bass
Tickets – $30/20 at door; family ticket $80 (2 adults + 2 children); bookings ph: (02) 9809 5185; on-line at: www.maraisproject.com.au