Travesty
for solo viola
Composed for Jamie Miles
Commissioned by the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) as part The ANAM Set 2025 and written for Jamie Miles, with its world premiere during ANAM’s 2025 recital season at the Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne.
This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Anthony and Sharon Lee Foundation
Program note:
The viola is, to me, the most expressively powerful instrument in the string family. Its power lies in its physical limitations. It has an imperfect sound, always too large or too small for the music it plays. It strains to be expressive.
Travesty celebrates this unique character of the viola. It oscillates between high plaintive melody and frenzied dance-like accompaniment, employing extravagant ornamentation as a ‘hinge’ between these two states. Harmonic cadence is also used as an expressive trope that becomes increasingly exaggerated as the piece progresses, a kind of eccentric architecture carved through the piece.
The piece is dedicated to Jamie Miles, whose beautiful playing is, in contrast, far from imperfect.
About the composer:
James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer, whose work draws from concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist musical languages, staking out an idiosyncratic stylistic space that has been described as ‘electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart’ (Boomkat) and ‘haunted Jacobean ASMR’ (The Wire). Investigating the creases, cracks, and folds in traditions ranging from early music to new age, Rushford’s work subtly exaggerates seemingly liminal aspects such as atmosphere and the bodily presence of the performer until these take on a weight equal to musical elements such as pitch, rhythm and timbre.
In recent years, Rushford’s solo work has been guided by his theorisation of sonic images, particularly the shadow, which has inspired pieces as diverse as an hour-long companion to Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (See the Welter, for solo piano, 2016) and a sumptuous translation of the play of light across flat surfaces into synthetic sound (The Lake from the Louvers, 2020). Rushford has longstanding performance practices on piano, synthesizers and electroacoustic devices, and portative organ, bringing to all of these a delicacy of touch and a harmonic sensibility in which unorthodox tunings coexist with influences from fin de siècle Impressionism, the 20th century avant-garde, and many strains of popular music.
As a composer, James has been commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Neon (Oslo), Speak Percussion (Melbourne), Ensemble Vortex (Geneva), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Ensemble Offspring (Sydney), Decibel (Perth), Melbourne International Arts Festival, Norway Ultima Festival (2011), Unsound Festival (New York 2014) and Liquid Architecture (Melbourne).
As a performer, he has presented work at STEIM Institute (Amsterdam), Issue Project Room (New York), GRM Présences Electronique Festival (Paris), Super Deluxe (Tokyo), Blank Forms (New York), Monday Evening Concerts (Los Angeles), Send and Receive Festival
(Winnipeg), Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Only Connect Festival (Oslo), Adelaide Festival, MONA FOMA and the Tectonics Festival. He has also performed as a soloist with the Krakow Sinfonietta, Australian Art Orchestra, and collaborated with Michael Pisaro, Annea Lockwood, Klaus Lang, Eyvind Kang, David Behrman, Tashi Wada, and artists Ryat Yezbick, Haroon Mirza, O.B. De Alessi Michael Salerno and Dennis Cooper.
James has ongoing collaborative projects with Joe Talia, Golden Fur (with Sam Dunscombe and Judith Hamann), Ora Clementi (with crys cole), Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger, Anthony Pateras, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Francis Plagne.
His music has been published by a variety of international labels including Unseen Worlds (US), Blank Forms (US), Prisma (Norway), Another Timbre (UK), Holidays (IT), Black Truffle (AUS), KYE (US) and Shelter Press (Fr).
In 2017, James completed a Doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts.