A recent guest visitor to ANAM said “today we need to realise that music is more than just entertainment”, and how right she was! For in all the music we learn, play, and listen to we are dealing with, and tuning in to, much more.
In 2025 ANAM will be tuning in to the Australian avant-garde, to the miracles of Mozart’s intuition, to Beethoven’s ethos, and to what’s new in the minds of young Estonian composers. We will be tuning in to French music, along with the past and present colleagues of Ravel, who will be celebrated at the end-of-the-year chamber music festival. We will be tuning in to our immediate surroundings with a program led by Anna Goldsworthy which invites us to reflect on the history of the Abbotsford Convent. Writer Nam Le, a former tenant at the Convent, will provide a tangent to this program with a poem commissioned by ANAM.
Throughout the year, our musicians will perform alongside acclaimed visiting artists, such as percussionist Steven Schick, clarinettist Michael Collins, and Brooklyn Rider. Together we will be tuning in to the whispers from the world about what music, the artform we are custodians of, should be dealing with right now.
Another departure from the more familiar, ANAM pianists will be playing a fortepiano (the bohemian predecessor of the modern grand) in various programs, thus allowing them to tune in to authenticity of composers such as Maria Szymanowska, Jan Ladislav Dussek, and Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, who is famous as the composer of the Marsellaise.
We all know that not only are ANAM’s faculty expert pedagogues, many of them are also internationally acclaimed performers. In concerts which they will be leading, we’ll encounter the peculiarities, traditions, and the depth of various instruments’ repertories.
The methods of study “slow-learning” and “listening“ we’ve worked on recently with ELISION Ensemble and the Australian String Quartet will see new and cultivated iterations through reappearances of both celebrated ensembles in 2025. And in April, when we embark on celebrating the glorious complexity and 100th birthday of French composer Pierre Boulez, who to music, is akin to the likes of Jackson Pollock or Wassily Kandinsky in the visual arts.
In 2024 ANAM gathered to discuss what global warming means for the arts, and we also invited Australian Indigenous artists as well as musicians building bridges to altogether different musical traditions to share their stories and musical ideas with us. These discussions and threads of listening and tuning in, will see further growth within the 2025 ANAM training program.
Schubert may have been scribbling his tones on a napkin in a café, as per a delightful poem by Mary Oliver, while composer Anna Clyne is probably typing hers in front of a computer. But all the same, the sonic dreams of these creative beacons contain wondrous worlds. The tracks into those worlds are coated in mystery, but of the kind that doesn’t need revealing, only study. That study – the daily industry of ANAM – is our entry-pass onto those tracks. Join us in this pursuit to tune in to the sounds of meaning and beauty, and to the springs of humanity.
Be sure to explore ANAM's incredible 2025 season today!