Wally Gunn, Maria Zajkowski, And The Consort Of Melbourne Residency

Your biography introduces you “as a composer who makes use of patterns and processes”. Could you tell us a little more about this and what that looks like when you’re developing a new piece?

Composition, for me, is a way to connect with others by telling a musical story, engaging an audience’s intellect and eliciting strong emotions. Stories of all kinds are inspiration: stories from personal history, from social history, from anthropological history, from biological and geological history. Stories that elicit awe for our universe, or pique curiosity about the lives, loves and extraordinary experiences of our fellow humans; these become metaphorical starting points for my work. Utilizing physical gesture interests me, and I sometimes employ speech and other vocalizations to heighten and extend the theatricality of musical performance. When I compose, I begin with simple mathematical patterns and processes, layered and woven into canons, echoes, hockets, and ostinati. As these textures unfold, I focus on the moments of emergent beauty that appear in the warp and weft. Beauty, as I see it, can come in different guises: sometimes in expressive lyricism, sometimes in clashing harmony or ungainly rhythms, and sometimes in the rigid grids of patterning. Part of my craft is to carve away at the textures as a sculptor might carve stone to reveal beautiful figures or forms, another part is to add complementary or contrasting material that is devised in response. In this way, the process consists of equal parts calculation and intuition. I am influenced by polyphonic music from the Renaissance and Baroque eras of the Western art music tradition, and equally, from pop music I listened to in my youth—especially 80s New Wave from Britain, and 90s grunge from the US—some of which similarly utilizes pattern and process in its construction.

How will process inform your residency at UKARIA? And what role will your collaborators have to play in this dynamic intensive?

Maria and I are at the early exploratory stages of creating a new large-scale work for 6 voices, and will spend our time at UKARIA working with our residency fellows, The Consort of Melbourne, on creating material for the work. Maria and I will be bringing lots of different material in various stages of development to try with the singers: ideas for improvisations; fragments of text and music; patterns and sequences; more fleshed-out sketches. We’ll use time in the rehearsal room with the singers to have them perform the material, and as a group we’ll review, revise, and compose on the fly, then have the singers perform the material again, to see what material shows promise. We’ll be eliciting feedback and accepting offers from the whole group all the while: the composer, the librettist, and the performers. We’ll also be exploring the placement of bodies in the performance space, and we’ll be investigating gesture and movement as integral parts of the piece. Our aim is to turn these workshop building blocks into drafts that we’ll refine to become the completed work.

After the residency are the next steps for this project?

In the second half of 2023, Maria and I will continue with the writing of the work, informed by the workshopping that we have done at UKARIA, and we hope to complete the work by the end of 2023. In early autumn 2024, we will join The Consort of Melbourne for a week of rehearsals and revisions, prior to the world premiere of the work in Melbourne, hopefully followed by a performance of the work later in the year with Australian Digital Concert Hall. We hope that our longtime collaborators in the US, vocal ensemble Variant 6, will stage the new work as part of their 2023 – 2024 performance season in Philadelphia, PA, and New York, NY.