Damien Ricketson and Matthew Shlomowitz, 1995
The following article was written in 2020 on the 25th anniversary of Ensemble Offspring.
Introduction
Ensemble Offspring: Twenty-Five Years of Making New Music in Australia outlines the contribution to new Australian music made by the Sydney-based arts company between 1995 and 2020. Currently, Ensemble Offspring is one of Australia’s most visible mixed chamber groups specialising in new art music and has played a key role in launching the careers of numerous Australian composers and performers. Having now been in continuous operation for twenty-five years, the organisation has proven itself adaptable and resilient. In 2016 Ensemble Offspring received the Australian Music Award for ‘Excellence by an Organisation’ in recognition of its sustained contribution to Australian music.
However, the vision of where Ensemble Offspring would be today was not clear when it began as the Spring Ensemble in 1995. A narrative account of the ensemble’s history thus seems of value, especially considering the limited scholarly attention directed towards small-to-medium arts companies. This general lack of attention and my role in the Ensemble as its co-founder and, until 2015, its Co Artistic Director, compel me to outline some insights into the history and evolution of the group and its main contributions to new music over the past quarter century.
Consequently, the purpose of this article is three-fold. Firstly, to provide a historical perspective on the Ensemble, particularly the earlier less documented years; secondly, to offer insights into the dynamics of a small arts organisation; and thirdly, to posit new analytical viewpoints for understanding the evolution of classical ‘art’ music from this perspective.
A further imperative to narrate the Ensemble’s evolution was the compilation of the Ensemble Offspring Digital Repository,[1] which comprised identifying, digitizing and collating recordings from throughout the history of the organisation including public broadcasters, private collections and already-existing streaming services. What was evident in compiling the repository was that while there was a great deal of documentation – crates of hard-copy materials and terabytes of data – there was little by way of a narrative that traced the evolution of the organization and its programming philosophy. Currently there is a miscellany of articles, reviews and broadcasts relating to specific events that Ensemble Offspring has presented. However, there is little literature that joins the dots to look at the underlying influences and forces that have driven the development of the Ensemble’s identity and artistic program to date, and by extension, its impact more broadly in the field of art music in Australia.
In search of model narratives, I looked to the histories of other new music ensembles, such as the Sydney Alpha Ensemble, which had been a formative influence in my own youth. However, I was surprised by the general lack of scholarly literature awarded to small arts organizations considering the influential role they play in shaping the landscape of Australian art music. It was possible to locate limited reviews and recordings of organizations such as Sydney Alpha or the Sydney Spring Festival; however, as with Ensemble Offspring, these were mostly of a project-specific nature, with little attention to their collective meaning and impact.
There is a lot of discourse about the contribution of small arts organizations to Australian culture at large. For example, a senate inquiry into the impact of Australia Council budget cuts[2] to the independent arts sector was ‘flooded with submissions’ and subjected to intense media analysis. However, the cultural contribution tends to be couched in general terms and is framed from the perspective of arts advocacy and government policy-making.
There is no shortage of scholarly writing in the field of new music that focuses on individual artists. In the history of Classical art music, this narrative is decidedly composer-centric, with change and progression driven by the ideas and innovations of the lone genius artist. However, while the creative processes of composers are frequently the subject of analyses, comparable analyses into processes that feed the curation and programming of new music seem scarce.
Where institutional narrative histories do exist, they tend to be about major arts organizations such as the Sydney Symphony[3] or Opera Australia[4], where new work is not their core raison d’être.
Given that small-to-medium arts companies are often cited as the engine-room of the arts sector, ‘providing an environment for creative risk, innovation and experimentation, and a platform for new and emerging work’[5], the voices of such organisations, at least in scholarly historical texts, seem to occupy the realm of footnotes. The evolution of Australian art music can be better understood when taking into account the perspective of these organizations: how they acquire their identity and values as well as how they change and why. A more socio-historical understanding of this nature somewhat deflates the composer as the dominant driver of new Australian art music, or at least positions their contribution from within a more complex group-dynamic of interconnected players and an ever-changing cultural environment.
Following is a review of twenty-five years of new music-making from the perspective of one such organization. The text is structured in three parts. First is a historical overview of the origins of Ensemble Offspring that identifies core artistic rationales that have remained consistent to this day. Second is an analysis of recurrent programming themes with a view to pinpointing the main types of contribution the Ensemble has made to new music in Australia at the time of writing. The third and final part examines the forces that have directly sculpted the development and survival of the organization. Traversing key personnel involved as well as external institutions such as presenting organizations and funding agencies, I contend that the type of art music that reaches the public is as much about chance, opportunity and barriers as it is about artistic vision and labour.
1. Origins
1.1 Spring Ensemble
The Ensemble began by accident in 1995 when I was entering my last year of a Bachelor of Music degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. A fellow student, Matthew Shlomowitz, and I wanted a final recital like that of our performer colleagues to conclude our studies with a concert. Rather than finish in silence with an orchestral work that would never be performed, we agreed to compose for the same large ensemble and organise an event. I mailed a tentative proposal to pianist Roger Woodward to include the event as part of his Sydney Spring Festival. He called the next day.
In today’s risk-averse climate I doubt any festival director would include a program of yet-to-be written works composed and performed by students. And possibly for that reason, a lot of starry-eyed young careers may stop right there. However, Woodward took on the project with one condition. We had to include a performance of Xenakis’ formidable piano and brass quintet, Eonta.
When compiling the festival program, we were told the group of musicians needed a name. How about ‘Spring Ensemble’, was our unimaginative reply. At the time, we had no idea this was to become an ensemble. We thought it was a one-off event.
On 9 September 1995, an unusual line-up of 31 student performers from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, including soloists Tonya Lemoh (piano), Corrado Palleschi (trumpet), Loretta Palmeiro (saxophone) as well as Roger Woodward took to the stage to perform the Xenakis, two works by Matthew Shlomowitz, his Piano Concerto and String Quartet, and two works by me, Lamina and Blech. With so many young people involved, the ABC Goosens Hall easily sold out. We were on a high. We had to do more. Spring Ensemble was born.
1.2 The Early Years
Although the idea of an Ensemble began by accident, the opening concert laid down three traits that would remain largely consistent in the years to come. First, mobilizing an ensemble had personal motivations: it was a platform by which Matthew and I could have our music performed. Indeed, I would almost exclusively throw my energies into the Ensemble as inexorably linked to my own compositional aspirations for another two decades.
However, Roger Woodward’s insistence on Xenakis in the first program also set us off in a particular programming direction. This was not to be a Philip Glass Ensemble[6] that focused exclusively on the music of its founding composers, but an ensemble that contextualized new works together with seminal existing work from the 20th century.
The strange and unbalanced large ensemble of the first performance[7], though never replicated, would also predict how the Ensemble would be driven in future. Rather than agreeing to compose for a discrete set of instruments, Matthew and I had basically written down every performer-friend we could think of who had shown interest in playing new music. What constituted the instrumental line-up of Spring Ensemble-cum-Ensemble Offspring would be fluid through much of the organization’s early history. However, that original decision did predicate that the ensemble would be built around personalities rather than instruments.
The pattern of the early years involved a series of performances as part of the Sydney Spring Festival and the occasional concert outside of this annual event. The Spring Ensemble had fallen into the de facto role of ensemble-in-residence of the Spring Festival. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Dedicated new music festivals such as Sydney Spring have proven difficult to sustain and the festival was undoubtedly under-funded and in need of cheap musicians. Like other areas of the music industry, we were a young starry-eyed collective in desperate need of some attention and happy to provide it. Programming was largely a bartered exchange of works that Woodward wanted to hear, mostly by his featured guest composers, and Matthew and I securing programming slots for ourselves as well as for composer-colleagues of our own generation.
Outside the Sydney Spring Festival, the Ensemble pursued a hotchpotch of opportunities, including events such as ‘Sounds French’ with the Alliance Française, and ‘Transfigured Nights’ under the direction of Michael Finnissy, as part of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (1997). In those days, the ensemble was led by Matthew Shlomowitz. I was pursuing postgraduate studies in The Netherlands with Louis Andriessen, a composer who believed musical renewal was intrinsically tied up with the formation of independent artist-led ensembles. He instilled a strong DIY ethos that I was to bring home in 1998 with renewed, if sometimes misplaced fervour. The Ensemble had become my primary mission.
By the end of the 90s, the relationship with the Sydney Spring Festival had become strained around issues of money and perceived leadership. In an attempt to assert an independent identity, our name was changed to Ensemble Offspring. In hindsight, jumping ship from the Sydney Spring Festival may have been somewhat impetuous. The Ensemble would not have come into being without the relationship. However, independence was inevitable, not least because Sydney Spring ceased to exist a couple of years later.
2. Musical offerings
Ensemble Offspring’s primary contribution to Australian music is its sustained program of premiering new works. Between 1995 and 2020, approximately 250 world premiere performances and recordings were identified, however, a larger number is suspected if incorporating incomplete data such as improvisations, student works as part of educational programs and guest performances facilitated by Ensemble Offspring (for example, third-party musicians appearing as part of the Ensemble Offspring’s festival-like events such as the Sizzle series). Many, though not all, were works by our own generation, that is, composers graduating in the 90s and now in their 40s. The Ensemble also presented a great deal of recent international work to local ears, with approximately 200 Australian premieres in the same period. World and Australian premieres aside, what type of musical contribution did this represent?
Ensemble Offspring’s motto, ‘innovative new music’ – found consistently on programs, marketing collateral and its website between 2007-15[8] – ostensibly signalled an artistic rationale based around exploring the quality of innovation in its various musical manifestations, rather than the promotion of music of a particular style or aesthetic. The ‘innovative’ remit arguably, though not always, ruled out much of the reactionary anti-modern momentum that gained traction in Australia in the wake of the so-called ‘style wars’ in the local concert music scene at the end of the 20th century[9]. However, ‘innovation’ was suitably vague so as to embrace a more diverse set of music practices than some of the more uncompromising specialist new music ensembles, such as those that our immediate forebears, Elision, had embraced. The Ensemble changed the motto to ‘adventurous new music’ in 2015 in a further opening of the definition to reference a spirit of music-making, rather than the potentially progressive ideological signalling suggested in the word ‘innovative’.
The eclectic music pursued under the ‘innovation’ banner, which spanned everything from early Minimalists to late Modernists, did not always present a coherent ‘brand’ for audiences. Nonetheless, by the second decade, a number of recurrent themes had emerged that seemed to position the Ensemble with a distinct approach to programming and presentation at that time in Australia. I will separate the dominant programming streams into five overlapping themes: spectral music; open music; cross-artform and cross-genre collaborations; microtonality and instrument building, and finally; on voice and diversity.
2.1 Spectral threads
Ensemble Offspring first introduced the monumental Talea by French composer Gerard Grisey to Australian audiences in a concert called ‘Spectral Guises’ at the Paddington Uniting Church in 2002. The work featured again in the tour ‘Thirteen Colours’ in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (2009/10), in the ISCM World New Music Days (2010), in the Shanghai International New Music Week and in the Ensemble’s 20th anniversary event ‘Future Retro’ (both in 2015). The exhilarating and virtuosic chamber work is one of the most programmed in the Ensemble’s repertory and is the product of one of the father figures of the ‘Spectral’ movement.
Of all the interesting international musical developments in recent decades, Spectral music – a school of composition that focuses on timbre as its primary generative element – has been one of the more influential. Ensemble Offspring has repeatedly programmed the work of both father figures of the movement, including Tristan Murail’s Treize couleurs du soleil couchant and Garrigue as well as Grisey’s 40-minute masterpiece Vortex Temporum. Other related Australian premieres that have been highlights include: Claude Vivier’s Bouchara, a lush work characterized by rich microtonal harmonies derived from the technique of ring modulation; Professor Bad Trip ‘lessons’ 1, 2 & 3 of Fausto Romitelli, an astonishing work that manages to capture the timbres of psychedelic rock without being derivative of it; and Kaija Saariaho’s Cendres, which was performed in Australia just two years after its world premiere.
Spectral composition techniques can also be felt in the many Australian works the Ensemble has commissioned. For example, the deceased Bozidar Kos incorporated Spectral techniques into his music as early as the 80s, and the microtonal harmonic language of Michael Smetanin’s work Swell, which he wrote for Ensemble Offspring, employs similar techniques.
Analyses of sound spectra and the application of this acoustic knowledge in deriving compositional strategies has fast entered the vocabulary of techniques available to young composers today, and can be seen in some of the young Australian works Ensemble Offspring has commissioned, such as the sculpted chamber sonorities of Sam Smith’s Threaded Through Merridians and the live real-time spectral A20 of Dan Thorpe: both premiered at the Ensemble’s 20th birthday celebration, ‘Future Retro’.
2.2 Open music
If one lineage of programming leads back to Paris and the meticulous and refined chamber sonorities of the Spectral movement, a counterpoint lineage traces back to the experimental New York school, particularly the tradition of indeterminacy. Not only did the theme of ‘openness’ pervade much of the rhetoric around the ensemble – promoting a culture of ‘open-mindedness’ in performers and audiences was a “core value” in the organization’s business plans[10] – but also, many of the works commissioned and performed were deliberately open to radically different interpretations: mobile forms, unconventional notations and game-pieces in which the performer was entrusted with critical creative decisions.
On one level, open works, especially open scored works, were pragmatic for the ensemble. For much of its history, especially the earlier years, the combination of instruments was unusual and in a consistent state of flux. Works with flexible instrumentation were simply more programmable to a variety of situations and available performers.[11]
On another level, Ensemble Offspring’s pursuit of open works was about musician empowerment. Following a series of workshops with Sydney improviser Jim Denley in 2006, core members of the ensemble became increasingly involved in non-score-based practices, including improvisation and the creation of works that employed unconventional forms of notation, thereby inviting imaginative evaluation and a sense of collaborative ownership on the part of the performers. The topic of ‘openness’ would also feature in some of the Ensemble’s community outreach activities with young musicians and was the core subject area of the Stepping Stones education resource, published by Australian Music Centre, 2008 for use in senior school music curricula.
Naturally, John Cage was one of several seminal 20th century figures that featured repeatedly. Musicologist Richard Toop made a rare cameo appearance as the soloist in Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (2001). Cage’s ‘number pieces’ from the latter period of his life featured in many performances, including the Cage Uncaged festival in 2007 in the then newly opened Carriageworks and in 2012 as part of the 100th birthday celebration at the Sydney Opera House where the Ensemble performed together with the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Another strand of Ensemble Offspring’s open works has been ‘game pieces’: musical works that are sets of rules that govern the way in which performers interact, without necessarily dictating how they should sound. Such pieces have played an important part in developing the musicians' skills with improvisation. Numerous programs have featured ‘renegade’[12] performances of John Zorn’s Hockey and Cobra, and a raft of works in this vein have been especially composed for the group, such as the Musify+Gamify event in the 2015 Vivid @ Seymour featuring premieres by Cor Fuhler, Julian Day and others.
Game-like environments and graphic scores also proved a useful vehicle by which Ensemble Offspring was able to collaborate with musicians from varied backgrounds, particularly within the local experimental and improvisation communities. One noteworthy event was at the Red Rattler in Sydney (2011), where members of Ensemble Offspring joined musicians associated with the Splinter Orchestra and the NOW now festival[13] to perform Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise. Ensemble Offspring has contributed to new graphic and unconventional forms of notation that have been enjoying an international renaissance in recent years, particularly in relation to animated scores. The premieres of works such as David Young and Louise Curham’s Waiting to Turn into Puzzles or live-generated scores such as Steffan Ianigro’s Elastic Evolution present examples of this practice.
2.3 Cross-artform and cross-genre
With new music variously accused of existing in a ‘ghetto’ or an ‘ivory-tower’, and sometimes castigated even by its own classical music tradition, collaborating with artists from other disciplines as well as musicians from other traditions has enabled Ensemble Offspring to position itself within a broader milieu of contemporary arts practices and to reach more diverse audiences.
Waiting to Turn into Puzzles (2008) was a collaboration between composer David Young and experimental filmmaker Louise Curham that featured in the Chauvel cinema in Paddington as well as the Australian Centre for Moving Image in Melbourne. Curham's hand-manipulated film became the visual material for the score so that the musicians played the film while the film played them. It was just one of a number of projects where Ensemble Offspring worked with artists in dance, theatre, film, installation and new media.
One of Ensemble Offspring’s most fruitful collaborations was with director Carlos Gomes and actor Katia Molino of Theatre Kantanka. They've appeared in the music-theatre event ‘Sound Absurd’ (2010) and in my own hybrid music-dance production The Secret Noise (2014). Our biggest collaboration, however, was Bargain Garden (2012), a surreal exploration of consumerism that fused physical theatre, live and electronic music, installation and multimedia.
Collaborations such as these not only resulted in the creation of new hybrid works, they also exposed the Ensemble to different viewpoints and creative strategies. The creative development model by which Bargain Garden came into being – a process more common in theatre and dance, where new work is created in situ in intensive blocks of time with a mixed team of creative contributors – opened up the possibility of alternatives to the typical commissioning model. Rather than simply letting the composer work in isolation with a scheduled date to hand over the score, structured improvisation, workshops and development opportunities for major new works became more common in planning new works as demonstrated in projects such The Secret Noise.
Working with theatre people also helped stylize the Ensemble’s extensive musical repertoire by incorporating physical movement: some examples are a premiere by Irish composer Jennifer Walshe and the letter pieces of Matthew Shlomowitz[14]. Working with a director and theatre performers also improved musicians’ stage presence with the presentation of regular chamber music concerts. Always performing when on stage, not just while playing music, rehearsing transitions and stage changes, as well as a heightened awareness and augmentation of the natural physical language of chamber music were just some of the theatrical details that rubbed off on the musicians in performance preparations, and received repeated positive critical attention and on which I have presented in several contexts[15].
Aside from cross-disciplinary collaborations, several of Ensemble Offspring’s musician collaborators over the years have also come from outside the classical music tradition. There has been an aesthetic affinity with the many local practitioners of more experimental, but non-score-based, practices, and this has resulted in several projects, including ‘Kontakte’, with electronic music artist Pimmon (Paul Gough), and a growing number of projects with the Sydney improvisation scene that surrounds the NOW now and the Australian Art Orchestra[16]. A raft of other local singer-songwriters, jazz combos, electronic music artists and even children’s bands have also appeared in the Ensemble’s informal ‘Sizzle’ events that have regularly taken place since 2010, mostly in Sydney bowling clubs[17].
2.4 Exotic tones and instruments
Another area of creative practice to which Ensemble Offspring has contributed is the field of microtonality, and the integration of more exploratory forms of sound arts with the refined language of chamber music.
Much of the microtonal music Ensemble Offspring has performed has been informed by ‘just-intonation’: scales characterized by the pure ratios found in the harmonic series. These unconventional tunings can be found in many performances scored for conventional instruments, such as the String Quartet Before the Universe was Born by Romanian Horatio Radulescu, whom the ensemble discovered via the Sydney Spring Festival, or Christopher Fox’s Blank, an open scored work performed at the Australian Centre for Photography in 2007. Most of the Spectral repertoire previously mentioned also features pitch structures that go beyond standard equal temperament. Much of the microtonal music, however, followed the lead of maverick Californian Harry Partch, together with his DIY ethos of building entirely new instruments.
Ensemble Offspring’s first-ever Partch’s Bastards concert occurred at the Paddington Uniting Church in 2003. The event featured everything from adapted guitars (Partch’s Barstow) and Christiaan van der Vyver’s (now Chris Rainier) self-built ‘diamond’ metallophone, to just-tuned wine-glasses by Amanda Cole, stacks of percussive tiles and an exhibition of automated instruments by Matthew Hoare.
A decade later the Ensemble curated another edition of Partch’s Bastards, this time with a team of instrument builders, musicians and composers working to common themes. The project started with a just-intonation system (centaur tuning) proposed by Kraig Grady, from which entirely new musical instruments were commissioned: the undachin tarhu (a string instrument) by Peter Biffin; a set of clarinis (wind instruments) by Linsey Pollak; and the centaur vibraphone (an adapted vibraphone) by Grady. Performers then took on the task of learning the instruments while five composers, Amanda Cole, Kraig Grady, Arana Li, Terumi Narushima and myself, all wrote new works exploiting the unique tuning and timbral qualities of the new instruments[18]. Radical reinterpretations of existing works by Philip Glass and Arvo Part were also included in the project, culminating in a performance at the Sydney Opera House in 2011. This was toured and released on CD as Between the Keys in 2013[19].
Of course, not all of Ensemble Offspring’s instrument-building projects were explorations of intricate microtonal tuning theories. Many related more simply to the exploration of found objects. With Claire Edwardes and Bree van Reyk at the core of the ensemble, the percussionist’s sensibility towards unlocking the infinite sonic potential of everyday objects rubbed off on all musicians. Other core members of the ensemble – flute, clarinet, violin, piano – regularly performed all manner of ‘auxiliary’ instruments. Such treatment of musicians as performers in the broadest sense – as opposed to specialists of a particular instrumental discipline – echoed recent international trends. Jennifer Walshe, for example, has proposed the ‘New Discipline’, a very DIY theatrical approach to composition which, among other approaches, suggests composing for the full performer with all their associated bodily complexities and quirks as a counterpoint to the traditional perspective of composing only for the instrument - where the body that performs it is substitutable[20]. Multitasking between conventional instruments and unconventional sound-sources, along with the use of physical gestures, has featured in many projects. Notable examples include the New Radicals program of 2012 and some of my own works such as Fractured Again and The Secret Noise, where performers have had to extend their instrumental skills in many directions ranging from learning to play a glass harmonica to being choreographed while performing.
There is a great deal of music that Ensemble Offspring has performed that doesn’t fall neatly into the four streams of activity above; however, an examination of diverse programs over many years does point to these being recurrent themes during the first 20 years.
2.5 Emerging and diverse voices
A different programming rationale has emerged in more recent years as attention has shifted from not only what is being said musically, but who is saying it. The Ensemble recognised that, as a growing platform that enabled new music to reach a public, it had a responsibility to assist others whose voices may otherwise struggle to be heard.
This thinking first manifests in the Hatched Academy emerging artist initiative starting in 2014. The mentoring program for young composers and performers was designed to provide professional performance opportunities as well as practical advice on programming and presenting new music – knowledge that had been virtually unavailable during Ensemble Offspring’s own early years of development. Initially involving just a composer and performer, mirroring the two disciplines of the then Artistic Directors, Hatched has evolved and expanded by 2020 to include guest mentors, associate artists, open mic nights and an intensive summer academy and has included many young composers and performers who are making impressive contributions to new Australian music today.
More recently, under the leadership of Claire Edwardes, the commitment to mentoring others has been expanded to include a First Nations Composer Program, notably the Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers mentoring project led by Dharug composer Christopher Sainsbury.[21] Following the first cohort of composers (2017-18) Brenda Gifford was appointed the inaugural First Nations Composer in Residence in 2020.
Edwardes’s championing of underrepresented voices, however, is arguably most visible in relation to gender equity in new music. Ensemble Offspring publicly committed to a 50:50 gender equity in programming, making the ‘Keychange Pledge’ and established a philanthropic ‘Noisy Women’ Commissioning program, comprising four major commissions to date with Eve Klein being the most recent recipient. Notably, 2017 featured an all-female year of programming. Premieres from that year included emerging composer Lisa Illean, with her work Cantor (after Willa Cather), and established figure Mary Finsterer whose opera Biographica was co-presented with Sydney Chamber Opera and Sydney Festival. The two works respectively won ‘instrumental’ and ‘vocal/choral’ works’ of the year in the 2018 Art Music Awards.
The focus on female-identifying and First Nations artists, echoes broader classical music discourse around gender equity and poor representation of diverse voices which has become prominent in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and even more recently in response to #BlackLivesMatter. Addressing programming inequity has therefore has become a prominent feature of the Ensemble’s programming imperatives in recent years.
3. Sculpting forces
The image of visionary Artistic Directors as a purveyor of curated produce for the public is fanciful. Rather, experience suggests they are navigators, stumbling between musicians, administrators, mandated board-members, funding agencies, institutions and presenters. Complicating the dynamics further, through much of Ensemble Offspring’s history, there were two Artistic Directors, myself and Claire Edwardes.
There was repertoire that Ensemble Offspring would never perform for aesthetic and practical reasons. The Ensemble was a new music ensemble and as such didn’t duplicate the classical canon that was already saturating stages. Also, Ensemble Offspring ostensibly performed repertoire of a more exploratory than conservative sensibility. That’s not to say that the group was inflexible, and boundaries could be elastic when the group was presented with suitable incentive. A performance of Elena Kats-Chernin’s live score to the 1930 film Menchen am Sonntag, directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, to a packed State Theatre as part of the Sydney Film Festival is one such example[22].
Theoretically, there should have been a large amount of aesthetically suitable repertoire available to the Ensemble via the large body of work composed for the archetypal ‘new music band’: that is, chamber orchestras such as Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain and the London Sinfonia. Ensemble Offspring, however, could rarely afford to expand their instrumental numbers to accommodate these forces for financial reasons. It is no accident that while there is a large body of international work for this type of ensemble, particularly coming out of Europe, there is a very modest contribution from Australian composers due to the lack of any equivalent local infrastructure.
Size aside, there was still a large body of repertoire, composers and project ideas that the Ensemble wanted to perform. Only a fraction of it would ever be realized[23]. Perhaps what is most telling about the external forces that shaped Ensemble Offspring is not the music that Ensemble brought to the public, but what it did not. There are dozens of notebooks filled with ideas that never happened: explorations into found sound and microtonality; music and fantasy; radical Israeli arts; tours to New York and Croatia; and composer commissions galore, to name but a few. Why some projects found enough traction to come to life and others did not, reflects the Ensemble’s capacity to seed their ideas in a complex and changing environment of potential partners, government funding agencies, donors, festivals, venues, artistic collaborators and direct audience tastes.
3.1 People
Before discussing the external forces that shaped Ensemble Offspring, it is necessary to look first to some of the internal forces, namely, the key players and their evolving influence on the identity of the Ensemble.
As the most consistent individual involved with the organisation from its inception in 1995 to 2015, I would be remiss not to be upfront about my own relationship and ambitions with the Ensemble. The group was founded in a concert of Matthew Shlomowitz’s and my music and remained the primary creative platform for my own work as a composer. On returning from studies with Dutch composer Louis Andriessen, and under the influence of his ideas, I was not motivated by the more common classical-composer model of chasing opportunities with ensembles and orchestras, but consciously decided to focus all my compositional ambitions into the group. As such, almost my entire compositional output from 1995-2015 was written for Ensemble Offspring, and my work appears consistently throughout the Ensemble’s programming history. Furthermore, for the music that was not my own, there were strong parallels between my personal compositional interests and the programming themes discussed earlier such as spectralism, microtonality, instrument building and hybrid works. That is, a substantial segment of Ensemble Offspring programming reflected the music I wanted to write or perhaps wished I had written.
Another figure central to developing the Ensemble’s artistic identity is Co-founder Matthew Shlomowitz. In the early years (1996-98), he was effectively the sole director before moving internationally to study with composer Brian Ferneyhough. Today he resides in London where, amongst other activities, he is the Co-Artistic Director of new music group Plus Minus[24]. Shlomowitz’s music also features heavily in the Ensemble’s programming history and his evolving personal compositional tastes, like mine, can be felt in the evolving programming decisions of Ensemble Offspring. For example, the UK Complexists feature more in the early years, with figures such as Michael Finnissy composing Ensemble Offspring a gift, Springtime, on the occasion of Shlomowitz’s wedding. However, as Shlomowtiz’s music has shifted in aesthetic – first aligned more with the ‘New Complexists’ and later with emerging movements such as the ‘New Discipline’ – this has been reflected not only in his own works performed by Ensemble Offspring but also in the Ensemble’s programming of others. One such example is the premiere of Jennifer Walshe’s Everything You Own Has Been Taken to A Depot Somewhere. Although Shlomowitz’s direct involvement was confined to the first few years when the group was Spring Ensemble, he has effectively remained an international artistic advisor, helping the group stay abreast of recent developments, especially those from Europe.
There are many other internal fingerprints guiding programming decisions that reflect the changing makeup and values of the musicians associated with the group. While a large number of musicians have performed under the Ensemble Offspring banner over two decades, some figures were of particular influence. Only two of the musicians involved in the first performance at the Spring Festival, Claire Edwardes and Veronique Serret, were to claim long-term relationships with the Ensemble. However, the group has been a magnet for various Australian musicians keenly engaged in new music over the years.
Prominent in the first decade or more of the group were musicians such as Kathleen Gallagher (flute), Geoffrey Gartner (cello), James Eccles (viola), Mark Knoop (piano) and Carl Rosman (clarinet). With musicians such as Gallagher and Gartner associated with the University of California San Diego Department of Music graduate program, and Knoop and Rosman associated with the then Melbourne-based Libra Ensemble (and Rosman with Elision), there was a heady sense of uncompromising technically-focused repertoire of a decidedly late-Modernist sensibility. Although not part of the Ensemble, there were other close figures such as musicologist Richard Toop who helped support and mentor people such as myself. As musicians moved on, for example Rosman to Ensemble MusikFabrik in Germany and Knoop to London, a new core of musicians began to crystallize and has remained more or less consistent to this day.
Claire Edwardes (percussion), Zubin Kanga (piano), Jason Noble (clarinet), Lamorna Nightingale (flute), Bree van Reyk (percussion) and Veronique Serret (violin) have been involved throughout the second decade of the Ensemble’s history. Collectively representing a diverse amalgam of musical interests and experiences, their influence can be seen in a more eclectic programming remit of the latter half of the Ensemble’s history. The fact that the Ensemble has increasingly become involved in collaboration with non-classical genres, for example, is reflected in the activities of core musicians such as violinist Veronique Serret and drummer/percussionist/composer Bree van Reyk, who have worked across popular and classical music. The division between composer and performer has also become less pronounced as many of the performers, such as van Reyk, has increasingly composed for the Ensemble. Since my departure other core musicians and contributors have included cellists Freya Schack-Arnott and Blair Harris and many others.
One musician who was involved in the first concert, and who ultimately proved to be the most influential, is the current Artistic Director and percussionist, Claire Edwardes. Although Edwardes participated as a performer in the early years of Spring Ensemble, she went on to study and work in The Netherlands for seven years before returning to Sydney in 2006. With an existing background with the group, a highly active track-record in leading projects and an insatiable drive to present new music to the public, it was all but inevitable that she would become the next major driving force. Just as I was motivated by having a platform to realize my own compositions, Edwardes was motivated by having a platform to perform the music that she wanted to hear. Bringing a performer’s sensibility to the Artistic Direction, Edwardes provided an effective foil, often balancing my more theoretical or cerebral approach to programming with a more pragmatic and visceral approach. After working together as a composer-performer team for almost a decade, Edwardes has remained the sole Artistic Director from 2016 and continues to this day.
Edwardes has continued to diversify and expand the Ensemble’s reach. In addition to further developing the informal Sizzle programming model and educational programs under the Hatched Academy, Edwardes has overseen many new directions including Kontiki Racket, a multi-day festival event combining performances from core Offspring performers, invited guests, discussion panels and market-like stalls. The first such event took place in the Nest Creative Space, a warehouse-like venue in an industrial area in Sydney in 2016,[25] and a more ambitious expansion of the model in the Paddington Town Hall in 2019[26]. Edwardes has also improved international reputation facilitating multiple international tours in 2019, including multimedia showcase appearances at Classical:NEXT in Rotterdam; and being a featured ensemble at the international Gaudeamus Muziekweek, as well as facilitating a three-way collaboration with German-based Ensemble Adapter and US-based International Contemporary Ensemble that saw the creation of a substantial new works, The Dam, by expatriate composers Kate Moore and Cleave by Natasha Anderson.[27] Edwardes legacy from more recent years, however, will be programming imperatives that seek to improve the visibility of women and First Nations composers in the art music community.
3.2 Institutions
While arts organizations may be propelled by people, their artistic programs are still only the result of what their environment cares to nurture. Ensemble Offspring’s identity is as much a product of the institutions around it as it is of the key personalities driving it. The independent arts sector, whilst often celebrated for its innovation, originality and resourcefulness, is hostage to intense financial pressures, and is particularly reliant on an ecosystem of sympathetic supporters. The idea that any one company in the small-to-medium arts sector, Ensemble Offspring included, wields true artistic autonomy is a myth.
Throughout the history of Ensemble Offspring, a series of institutional collaborators and their respective directors have exerted an influential role in shaping what projects reach the public.
In the early years from 1995-1998, Ensemble Offspring’s primary supporter was the Sydney Spring Festival. Conspicuous in the programs from this period are many of the composers that appeared as guests in Roger Woodward’s festivals, such as Horatiu Radulescu and James Dillan, and composers whom Woodward was noted for championing, such as Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman.
In 1999 the Sydney Opera House opened The Studio with a festival of hard-hitting new music[28], including the performance where Spring Ensemble became Ensemble Offspring[29]. Unfortunately, the Sydney Opera House’s support for the new music sector at large was short lived, as The Studio moved quickly towards a more popular and eclectic approach to programming. Ensemble Offspring, fortunately, was one of the only new music groups to maintain a relationship, largely due to producer Virginia Hyam. The Ensemble engaged in an ongoing series of events including: ‘Crossing the Finnish Line’ (2002) featuring a profile concert of Kaija Saariaho; ‘Art of Glass’ (2004), one of the first times early music by Philip Glass had been performed outside of his own ensemble; and ‘Surreal Interlude’ (2006), featuring new live scores to black and white films, including Michael Finnissy’s responses to Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice and Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour. One of the consequences of the relationship with The Studio was the honing of Ensemble Offspring’s programming strategy of mixing a major new premiere with an iconic ‘name’ composer, such as Philip Glass. The relationship with the larger Sydney Opera House also contributed a shift in programming that was less Euro-Modernist in its outlook.
Like the opening of The Studio in Sydney, the opening of the Melbourne Recital Centre similarly represented a short-lived injection of activity in the new music sector. In 2009 alone, Ensemble Offspring had three major engagements at the Recital Centre, including a performance of Steve Reich’s immense Tehillim as well as the ‘Open Music’ and ‘Thirteen Colours’ projects. However, with the venue accused of haemorrhaging money on ‘vanity projects’[30], the direct support for groups like Ensemble Offspring dried up quickly.
More recently institutional support has come from the Sydney Festival, as Ensemble Offspring featured in every festival 2013-16 during the tenure of Belgian director Lieven Bertels. As a trained musicologist with a particular interest in classical and electronic music, Bertels supported numerous projects where respective interests overlapped. Highlights included: ‘Ligeti Morphed’ (2013), featuring Beyond Atmospheres a reimagining of Ligeti’s classic for small ensemble with electric guitarist Oren Ambarchi and turntablist-cum-heart surgeon Martin Ng; and a project where Faith No More leadman Mike Patton played the part of the Italian narrator in a rendition of Luciano Berio’s Laborintus II alongside a collaboration with Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo in a new orchestration of his Hurricane Transcriptions.
While many presenting institutions such as venues and festivals helped bring select projects to fruition, the holy grail of artistic self-agency – government funding – was slow coming. For the first eight years, the Ensemble barely survived on a meagre diet of project-related fees, small grants, door-takings and personal repurposed dole payments. It wasn’t until 2003 that Ensemble Offspring received their first-ever program grant from Arts NSW: an AU$7,000 contribution towards presenting an ‘opera’, developing an instrument-building project and embarking on their first European tour including an appearance at the Warsaw Autumn festival. And it wasn’t until 17 years after the first performance that the Ensemble attained ‘Key Organisation (emerging)’ status with the national funding agency, the Australia Council for the Arts.
3.3 Timing
Without wishing to diminish the labour that has gone into Ensemble Offspring, its ongoing survival today owes a lot to timing. When the Ensemble was starting out, it was in the shadow of new music groups such as Sydney Alpha Ensemble, austraLYSIS, the Seymour Group and others based in Sydney. However, a combination of funding stagnation and fatigue saw many of these pioneering organizations grind to a halt with the change of millennium. In NSW, Sydney Alpha Ensemble presented their last public concert in 2000, Sydney Spring had its 12th and final festival in 2002[31]. While the Seymour Group enjoyed a late gasp of life as the rebranded ‘Sonic Art Ensemble’, it too wound up in 2007, thirty years after it had begun[32]. It is no accident that Ensemble Offspring received their first government funding from the NSW state government during this period. There was simply no other comparable chamber groups in NSW presenting new music with any continuity at the time.
In many ways, Ensemble Offspring represents a curious intergenerational organisation. The Ensemble emerged in the wake of the first generation of new music activity that had ridden the cultural waves set in motion during the Whitlam government era with the establishment of the Australia Council for the Arts. However, the Ensemble would establish a track-record of activity before a lively new generation of young artists began emerging more recently to make an impact in the new music community today. As such, the Ensemble was very fortunate to be well-positioned on an ascendant trajectory when funds were reduced in Senator Brandis’s raid on the Australia Council in 2015[33]. Due to this trajectory, it was the only mixed-instrument specialist new music group to receive multiyear government funding between 2017-2020.
The fact that the organization has had the resilience to endure where many others have failed was, in part, thanks to a lucky dose of being in the right place at the right time.
Unfortunately, however, that luck turned in 2020. The sustained erosion of the Australia Council’s structural ability to support artistic excellence, came to a head – amidst the Covid-19 pandemic – with Ensemble Offspring, along with 49 other professional arts organisations, losing their four-year funding.[34] At the time of writing, support from the local state funding agency, Create NSW, and a cash injection as a winner of the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards will enable the Ensemble to continue with some reduction to staff and artistic programs in the coming years.
Conclusion
Just before starting this article, I ran into one of the principal organizers of the now defunct Sydney Alpha Ensemble, clarinettist Peter Jenkins. I asked him if he knew of any literature on the historical contribution of his ensemble. Not only did he confirm there was none, he recounted how he had recently taken his boxes of archival materials to the tip to be destroyed. Curiously, however, he had felt compelled to return and retrieve them with the nagging sensation that they might be of value to someone at some time in the future.
The performances of Sydney Alpha Ensemble were my authoritative reference point for new music in my formative years. Their programming decisions, along with other Sydney-based organisations including the Seymour Group, Synergy Percussion and the Sydney Spring Festival in the 1990s, had a profound artistic impact on me as a young musician. While my studies at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music over 20 years ago were concerned with analyzing the evolution of composers’ ideas and techniques, an arguably more impressionable and visceral engagement with new music was driven by my attendance at concerts presented by these local organisations.
There was little literature then on how the organisations I held in such high regard operated and evolved aesthetically or pragmatically. As these small arts organisations have folded, a great deal of valuable institutional knowledge remains inaccessible and locked up in the minds of key players. I have no doubt that Ensemble Offspring could have developed more quickly and achieved more had there been information available to analyze, react to and model.
I hope that a researcher may one day take Peter Jenkins’ boxes and interview him. Sydney Alpha Ensemble’s story is just one of many untold small arts organization legacies that have shaped the development of new music today. More broadly, I hope enquiry in the field can lead to a better understanding of the dynamics of the new music landscape from the perspective of small presenting organisations, as a means of augmenting the more common angle of analyzing the output of specific artists.
Ideally I would like to see the composer demoted as the key driver of change in the field of new music and recast as more of a bit-player in a complex community of individuals and environmental forces that shape the evolution of music.
It is heartening to read the growing discourse on collaborative creative dynamics and complex environmental considerations in the evolution of new music. The insights of musicians such as Marilyn Nonken[35] represent a reorienting of our understanding of the way new music comes into being. Her recent publication Identity and Diversity in New Music is a welcome contribution. Similarly, the 2016 issue of Contemporary Music Review dedicated to ‘Collaboration’ in Contemporary Music[36]. Although the issue pertains primarily to composer-performer dynamics, the research does point towards ways in which we may better understand new music as arising from a highly negotiated space of decision-making that involves multiple parties. Such research can be further opened up to encompass collaboration across more complex creative group dynamics and be extended from composition and performance into the art of curation.
Higher level anthropological approaches to examining the new music community have been around since Georgina Born’s controversial analysis of the avant-garde’s institutional behemoth, IRCAM. Although her Rationalizing Culture[37] was criticized, and now appears dated, her ethnographic method does offer alternative approaches to analyzing the environment around music creation and production that could be applied to the small arts organisations and communities of independent artists that are the formative breeding grounds for the music of tomorrow.
Over the years, and as it has grown, Ensemble Offspring has slowly improved its practices in documenting and archiving its creative work. While the Ensemble today generates a rich digital footprint around its activities, the limited scholarly attention directed towards small-to-medium arts companies has given me reason to pause and query the prospects of what, if any, narrative will be taken from its history to date. Having recently departed the organisation, and on the occasion of its 25th anniversary – celebrations rendered silent by the Covid-19 pandemic – I have felt compelled to lay down some background and insights into the history and evolution of the group between 1995-2020. Despite recent funding setbacks and the coronavirus-induced shutdown of live performance through much of 2020, Ensemble Offspring will undoubtedly continue to play a role in the local art music landscape and I hope its collective contribution, together with other small arts organisations, may one day be the subject of further musicological study.
Endnotes:
[1] Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, ‘Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget Decisions on the Arts’ (Report, Commonwealth of Australia, 2015). Contact Ensemble Offspring for access to private recordings.
[2] Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, ‘Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget Decisions on the Arts’ (Report, Commonwealth of Australia, 2015).
[3] Fiona Fraser, ‘Orchestrating the Metropolis: The Creation of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra as a Modern Cultural Institution’, History Australia 11:2 (2014), 196-221.
[4] Annarosa Berman, The Company We Keep: An Intimate Celebration of Opera Australia (Sydney: Currency Press, 2006).
[5] Australia Council for the Arts, ‘Supporting Arts Organisations’ (Annual Report 2014-15).
[6] David Allen Chapman, ‘Collaboration, Presence, and Community: The Philip Glass Ensemble’, in Downtown New York, 1966–1976 (Dissertation, Washington University in St. Louis, Ann Arbor, 2013).
[7] Excluding soloists, the large ensemble on which Ricketson’s Lamina and Shlomowitz’s Piano Concerto was based included: flute, 3x clarinets (1 doubling bass cl.), 2x alto saxophones, 2x horns, piano (doubling sampler keyboard), 2x percussion, 3x violins & 3x basses (1 doubling electric bass).
[8] In 2016, the Ensemble adapted its byline to “adventurous new music”, in part because it rolled more easily off the tongue, but also to indicate the spirit in which the Ensemble hoped the programming would be received.
[9] See the letters sections of the Australian Music Centre’s Sounds Australian Journal (1989-91).
[10] ‘Open-mindedness’ is cited as one of the core values of the organization in its Business and Strategic plans on which its funding agreements with the Australia Council for the Arts are based.
[11] One of the biggest influences on what music was programmed was simply defined by the challenge of getting players with diverse individual careers in the one place at the one time.
[12] The ‘scores’ for Zorn’s game pieces are deliberately not published, but circulate in musician communities ‘in the underground as part of an oral/aural tradition’. Zorn refers to unsanctioned performances, where he is not present, as ‘outlaw’ or ‘renegade’ versions. See John Zorn, ‘The Game Pieces’, in Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York: Continuum, 2004), 196–200.
[13] The NOW now is a Sydney-based festival of spontaneous music and experimental sound. See ‘the NOW now’,
[14] Matthew Shlomowitz has a series of letter pieces combining sound and physical actions. Matthew Shlomowitz: ‘Letter Pieces’
[15] Damien Ricketson, ‘Listen with Your Eyes’, International Conference on the Multimodal Experience of Music (Sheffield, UK: 2015).
[16] See Ensemble Offspring: ‘Exit Ceremonies’ (Accessed 15 February 2016),
[17] At the time of writing, Ensemble Offspring had presented eight Sizzles: three in 2010 at the Waverly, Petersham & Camperdown Bowling Clubs curated by Jason Noble, Bree van Reyk and Veronique Serret respectively, then once every year since 2012 at the Petersham Bowling Club (except 2015, which was at the Red Rattler).
[18] A thorough description of the project can be found in Damien Ricketson, ‘Classical Music’s Bastards Offspring’, Music Forum 20.1 (2013).
[19] The program changed title from ‘Partch’s Bastards’ to ‘Between the Keys’ as one of our tour partners, the Illawarra Music Festival, refused to include the word ‘bastard’ in their family-friendly marketing. Ensemble Offspring: ‘Between the Keys’.
[20] Jennifer Walshe, ‘Ein Körper ist kein Klavier: Editorial zur Diskussion über die „Neue Disziplin’, in MuzikTexte, 149.
[21] Christopher Sainsbury. “NGARRA-BURRIA: New music and the search for an Australian Sound”, Currency House, Platform Paper 59 (2019).
[22] “This is not new music”, was the conductor’s quip on the first rehearsal. Damien Ricketson: ‘Ensemble Offspring Digital Repository’, Archive ID 533.
[23] If we imagine everything the Ensemble wanted to do wrapped up in a circle, the public experience of Ensemble Offspring was only ever the shaded slivers of a giant Venn diagram where Ensemble Offspring’s programming aspirations intersected with someone else’s.
[24] Plus-Minus Ensemble is an Anglo-Belgian collective. Formed by composers Joanna Bailie and Matthew Shlomowitz, the ensemble is distinguished by its interest in performative, electroacoustic and conceptual work. See Plus-Minus Ensemble.
[25] See media preview: Jenny Valentish, “Ensemble Offspring traverse uncharted waters in Kontiki Racket”, Sydney Morning Herald, 09/11/2016.
[26] See dedicated website: Ensemble Offspring, Kontiki Racket.
[27] See critical review: Peter McCallum, “Suppression Dam review: Chirping phones layer new soundscapes”, Sydney Morning Herald, 14/01/2019.
[28] Damien Ricketson: ‘Ensemble Offspring Digital Repository’, Archive, The Studio – premiere season.
[29] Gordon Kerry, ‘Grand old men flank offspring program’ [critical review], Sydney Morning Herald (15 March 1999).
[30] Robin Usher, ‘Empty seats for late-night “vanity projects”’, The Age On Line.
[31] Alexa Moses, ‘Spring festival wilts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 17 April 2002 (Accessed 16 March 2017).
[32] Peter McCallum, ‘Fitting farewell after 30 years’, Sydney Morning Herald, 23 October 2007,
[33] The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, Report on the Impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget Decisions on the Arts (Commonwealth of Australia 2015).
[34] Graham Strahle, “Looking To The Future In Tough Times: Ensemble Offspring”, Music Australia, 17/05/2020.
[35] Marilyn Nonken. Identity and Diversity in New Music: The New Complexities (Routledge, 2019).
[36]Alan Taylor, ‘Introduction to “Collaboration” in Contemporary Music’, Contemporary Music Revie, 35.6 (2016).
[37] Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (London: University of California Press, 1995).