This program explores the ineffable and poetic relationship between artists and their art, celebrating the mystery of musical creation.

‘Burruguu is all around us,’ writes Yuwaalaraay composer and storyteller Nardi Simpson: ‘yesterday, today and tomorrow’. In this spacious work, Simpson stretches our perception of time, musing on both the expansive Aboriginal Dreaming and the precise moment in which a musical work is realised.

In Light for the First Time, percussionist, drummer and composer Bree van Reyk invites us to imagine a near-universal yet forgotten experience: opening one’s eyes for the first time. Our experience of time slows down in this exquisite musical meditation: a shimmering, abstract expression of ‘the sight of a being which is yet to be born’.

The Heart’s Ear evolves from a single fragment of Sufi melody. Virtuosic yet earthy and organic, this striking work by Liza Lim explores the attentive silence that permeates the poetry of thirteenth-century mystic Jelaluddin Rumi: ‘a state of listening with ‘the heart’s ear’’.

This program also features a new commission from Natalie Williams.