Advice to a Girl
Music by Anne Cawrse
Album released February 2022
With thanks to Chamber Music Adelaide classikON hears from composer Anne Cawrse about her first album…
Advice to a Girl is my first full-length album of original music, featuring works composed for various combinations of strings, guitar, and voice, written between 2004 and 2021. As is often the case, there is a personal story behind each work – how I came to write it, who commissioned and premiered it, how I feel about it, and particularly for the older works, how my feelings for the music have changed as time has passed.
I selected these works for inclusion on the album because I feel they clearly represent who I am as a composer. They demonstrate the things that were, and remain, important to me in music, and I am very proud to have them out in the public in this way.
The earliest works on the album, the song cycle A Woman’s Song and the guitar quintet Imperfect Fourth, were composed when I was a PhD student at the Elder Conservatorium. Both these works owe a debt to Adelaide’s Zephyr Quartet, who commissioned and premiered them; the songs in Pilgrim Uniting Church in 2005 with Soprano Emma Horwood, and the guitar quintet in the original Jade on Twin Street in 2004 with guitarist Alex Tsiboulski. There is a lot of Adelaide in the music on album: it features a work composed for the Australian String Quartet back in 2015 (at the time a half-Adelaidean quartet) and a 2021 work written for Sharon and Slava Grigoryan. The final track, and the giver of the album’s title, was composed especially for this release, but received its first public outing at 2021’s inaugural She Speaks Festival, courtesy of Mezzo-Soprano Cheryl Pickering and the Seraphim Trio.
The recordings were made in 2020-21, and the performers read like a veritable who’s who of Adelaide’s finest chamber musicians. From the Australian String Quartet, the Grigoryans, soprano Bethany Hill, guitarist Alex Tsiboulski, and a string quartet of Cameron Hill, Helen Ayres, Martin Alexander and Ewen Bramble, I really was spoiled with excellence.
It is every composer’s dream to have fine musicians invest their time, knowledge, and skill in bringing your music to life.
Non-performing composers are always at the mercy of their performing advocates. Without others, our music stays on the page. I have always written with the intention of my music being played and heard. For this, I can thank my high school music teachers who facilitated performances of my earliest compositions, and my early composition teacher Grahame Dudley, who encouraged me to write for the Elder New Music Ensemble. This is where I met the Zephyr Quartet, as well as Leigh Harrold and Greta Bradman – in all, an impressive list of collaborators with which to begin one’s career.
I am immensely grateful to Arts SA for the Project Grant funding that enabled me to put this album together. Without their financial assistance, it would have been near impossible for me to create an album of this scope or this quality. Recording classical music is unlikely to make money, but without quality recordings that can appear in popular playlists, on radio stations, and be easily accessed around the world, a composer is silent.
Silence in music is the same as being invisible; if people can’t hear your music, how can they know what you are capable of, or what you’ve created?
As well as being worthy of being heard, I also believe that these works are worthy of being played. The recording process is a little strange in that you are forced to ‘lock in’ one particular interpretation as being the correct one. I don’t believe music actually works like that. A big part of the beauty of music- and for me, the joy in composing – is that whatever is on the page can be read and played in multiple ways, with different but equally correct results. If the existence of this album means that more people are interested in exploring, learning, and playing these pieces, as well as listening to them, then I will be supremely happy.
When I started composing, I would never have thought I’d have my works on an album, let alone a full-length album of only my music. Younger me would have found that quite bemusing, probably rather audacious, and perhaps a little boastful. As much as this album is about sharing some of my music with the world, it also acts as a reminder to myself, saying that these works are good and right and that they deserve to be heard as much as the next person’s music. After composing for almost 20 years, it’s taken me a long time to get to the point of recognising that I deserve this. I certainly don’t intend to leave it so long for the next release.
Anne Cawrse: April 2022
Advice to a Girl is available on all streaming platforms. To purchase a CD, please visit https://annecawrse.bandcamp.com/releases
Photo credit: credit Emma Luker.
Album artwork: Greer Tappert
