A story I have long found compelling is that of Italo Calvino's imagined conversation between the traveller Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. After listening to Polo's telling of humanity's rich and diverse lived experience, the Khan effectively asks, "Is that it?" The reply comes that there are two ways to engage with the inferno of the living. The first is to accept and join it; the second is "risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” And that is exactly how I understand being an artistic director, a band leader.
ELISION deals in fragile, rare, and difficult aesthetics and creates a space for them to be heard and flourish. My task is to create those very circumstances where conversations embodied in creative work over decades can unravel and spill out to influence people in a variety of myriad and unforeseen ways, and allow the idealism, the complex and uncompromising personalities of extraordinary musicians to be discovered, distilled and brought to bear upon long-term artistic relationships with composers.
Recently, ELISION completed a major European tour with performances in four countries. On stage in Berlin and Hanover, as part of our ensemble, were ANAM alumni Alex Waite (piano 2018), Harry Ward (violin 2020), and Rohan Dasika (double bass 2014). Alex’s membership of ELISION began in 2016 as a result of our first ever ANAM residency that saw the Australian premiere of Enno Poppe’s Speicher. When we celebrate our fortieth birthday this July at the Melbourne Recital Centre, Aditya Bhat (percussion 2024) will feature in the Australian premiere of Liza Lim’s Tailor of Time.
Our journey continues on 14 September with Sorcerer, and on 18 September with ‘ELISION and ANAM’. In Iannis Xenakis’s Jalons, the noise is anything but silent; complex mathematical structures are burnt through with raw, passionate intensity. The title of Liza Lim’s duo, Inguz, refers to the Viking rune symbolising fertility, which is associated with “the moon, intuition and the desire for harmonisation in personal relationships”. Passion here is focused toward attunement. The ensemble work, ‘Nalet’ from Serbian composer Milica Djordjević returns the listener to a world of flying sparks and turbulence, an energised, frictive space. And a new work from composer Richard Barrett written especially for the virtuosi of ELISION; Ryan Williams, Paula Rae, Carl Rosman, and Peter Neville, with the ANAM cohort, folds electronic soundscapes generated through improvisation back into themselves, implosive and compulsive, all based upon a text of the poet Sappho.
The vision of Paavali Jumppanen, in tasking and trusting ELISION with this three-year residency beginning in 2024, was to essentially have empowerment at the heart of a process that would see the musicians of ANAM grow and undertake the challenges offered within an uncompromising new music space.
I look forward to the coming years and to being able to trace remarkable musical journeys that have begun through our time at ANAM.
Words by Daryl Buckley, ELISION Artistic Director
SORCERER
Monday 14 September 7pm
Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent
ELISION Ensemble
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ELISION AND ANAM
Friday 18 September 7pm
Rosina Auditorium, Abbotsford Convent
ELISION Ensemble
ANAM Musicians
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