News in Detail

New Anthony Pateras Releases

14 Apr 2012

Speak Percussion is featured on two brand new releases from composer/performer Anthony Pateras. The first is a soundtrack for the new feature length sci-fi film by director Eron Sheean, Errors of the Human Body. Pateras beautifully integrates lush harmonies with brooding electro-acoustic textures. There's even a dance tune! The soundtrack can be bought here. To read the review by Cyclic Defrost click here.

Speak also features on Pateras's new 5-CD box set of compositions spanning the last decade of his work. The twelvtet, sextet and solo works commissioned by Speak are all included in this blockbuster collection. The Australian distributor is Fuse. Distributed in Europe & Japan by Metamkine.

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AUTOMATION

01 Mar 2012

Speak Percussion & The Substation are proud to present AUTOMATION - Melbourne Robotic Percussion Community Project.

Ever wanted to inspire your students with alternative ways of making music? Would your students or children respond to making music with robots and automated devices? AUTOMATION is about inspiring them to find new ways of creating and listening to music and it’s FREE!

About the project
Six of Australia’s leaders in the niche art form of automated percussion are brought together with Melbourne’s own Speak Percussion to engage with young percussion students from the Western suburbs in one collaborative massed sonic event. Automated bass drums, prepared turntables and radio controlled robotic-tappers will take the stage in a rare performance event that connects community participants with some of the world’s most unique experimental percussion practice.

During the May residency school groups of all ages and abilities are invited to attend, and each session will be specifically catered for the students’ experience with percussion and music-making. Students will participate by interacting with each of the automated instruments, and will be guided in groups to create their own music for the instruments. All sessions will involve performance by students alongside professionals from Speak Percussion.

This free program is exclusively for students of the western suburbs of Melbourne, and will allow students a unique, hands-on introduction to experimental music making and offer them the skills and inspiration to compose and perform their own works. Whether for percussion or otherwise, the goal is for students to gain the confidence to push their creative boundaries and find new and exciting ways of making music, inventing and building instruments and new approaches which will reveal new sounds.

Students who display enthusiasm and aptitude for the AUTOMATION project will be invited by Speak Percussion to participate, during the September holidays, in a community performance on Saturday 29th September. This date will feature a full day of AUTOMATION performances at The Substation, involving students, community groups, emerging young percussionists from Australia-wide as well as Speak Percussion and the AUTOMATION artists.

Artists involved
Speak Percussion artists include: Eugene Ughetti, Matthias Schack-Arnott & Matt Horsley
AUTOMATION artists include: Robbie Avenaim, Dale Gorkinkel, Adam Simmons, Matt Gardiner, Ernie Althoff & Graeme Leak

Session Details & Dates
1 – 13 May, 2012: school workshops & master classes
24 – 29 September, 2012: selected students to be involved in rehearsals & community performance

Sessions will be held in classes with a maximum of 30 students.
Primary School classes will run for 1 hour and Secondary School classes for 1.5 to 2 hours, dependant on the school.

Each session is presented specifically to the age and musical experience of students in mind.

Sessions are FREE for all students, with schools needing only to arrange transport to The Substation, Newport. It is located in Market Street, and is readily accessible with parking at the front and rear. It is also located within 3 minutes walk from Newport railway station.

Booking Details & More Information
For session bookings or for further information please contact Project Manager Laura Holian at laura@speakpercussion.com or on 0411 124 122.
Please be ready to provide the approximate number of students (max. 30 per session), year level and musical experience (ie. Primary classroom music, beginner instrumentalists or experienced instrumentalists/VCE Music students). Spaces are limited, so please call to discuss session times.

Schools unable to attend
For any reason your school cannot attend during our two week program, students are welcome to attend a session out of school hours. This would require students to contact us directly to register their interest in afterschool sessions. These sessions would run 4:00-6:00pm on selected weekdays depending on demand. This is recommended for upper-primary and secondary students as they would need to make their own way to and from The Substation. Parents are also welcome to attend.

If your students would like to attend an afterschool session please contact Laura Holian at laura@speakpercussion.com or on 0411 124 122, and for more information please refer students to our website www.speakpercussion.com

This project is proudly supported by
The Substation
Arts Victoria

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Speak Emerging Artists Program 2012

15 Feb 2012

Speak Percussion is proud to announce its Emerging Artists Program for 2012.

The 2012 Speak Emerging Artists Program will provide the opportunity for 12 Australian emerging percussionists, aged between 18-28, to join forces in presenting two major projects alongside Speak Percussion.

Applications close on Monday the 5th of March.

For more information please go to the Collaborations tab of our website.

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3MBS interview

14 Dec 2011

Tune in for an hour special on the life and work of Eugene Ughetti on Melbourne's 3MBSfm.

6-7pm Thursday 15th December, 2011

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CITY JUNGLE Melbourne gig announced

01 Nov 2011

On the 24th of November CITY JUNGLE hits Melbourne.

One of the rare opportunities to hear live music in the astonishing Planetarium.

This is event will be presented in the 2011 Big West Festival and features a set by Speak of the music of Terminal Sound System and a new set by Synergy. It's an intense journey through the history of Jungle, Drum & Bass and associated underground UK dance genres.

CITY JUNGLE Big West LINK

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Facebook & Twitter

30 Aug 2011

Follow us on Facebook & Twitter for daily posts on the creative activities we're involved in.

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BLOG: "emerging artists speak...."

26 Dec 2010

After the completion of part 1 of the Speak Emerging Artists Program, the participants have jotted down their impressions and experiences on the AMC website.

Click below for a direct link....

AMC Speak Emerging Artists Blog

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10 Years of Speaking Percussion

29 Oct 2010

Article by David Lang
Written for the Australian Music Centre.

14 October 2010
10 years of 'speaking percussion'

Australians are fascinated by percussion, judging by the number of successful percussion ensembles and collectives that can be found around the country. To name just a few: based in Sydney are Synergy Percussion, TaikOz and MATCH Percussion; Perth has Tetrafide Percussion; in Brisbane is Karak Percussion; and from Melbourne - and celebrating their tenth anniversary this year - is Speak Percussion.

Eugene Ughetti, artistic director of Speak Percussion, tried to make sense of this on The Music Show on ABC Radio National recently: 'I think Australia has a really good appetite for percussion. We're a sporting country - percussion's pretty physical. We're full of adventure, and the new, and I think that that's what percussion represents in Australia, so I feel like we're in good company.'

Percussionists, more so than any other instrumentalists, like to stick together. Is it because they spend so much time sharing their instruments? Or is it because of the 'home' provided by the designated percussion room found in every conservatorium or school music centre? Educational institutions have certainly played an important role in the rise of the percussion ensemble since the 1950s. Most percussion ensembles remain student groups - providing a chamber music experience for percussionists - but some venture out into the wider world as a professional ensemble.

This is the path Speak Percussion has taken. A group of percussionists - students at the Victorian College of the Arts - came together in 1999 for a recital given by Minako Okamoto, who was playing Marimba Spiritual by Minoru Miki. The following year they formed again, this time officially, to perform in Musica Viva's Ménage series, calling themselves Speak Percussion. The name had come about from the experience of rehearsing with a musician whose English was not so good. 'We found we were using percussion as a way of communicating with each other,' Ughetti explains. In other words, the music became a common language - they were 'speaking percussion'. The name continues to be relevant to their desire to use percussion to communicate: 'a lot of what we've done has referenced that title'.

Eugene Ughetti recalls the group being very ambitious from the start, with hopes of becoming an established, highly-regarded Australian percussion ensemble, while also retaining 'a risk-taking quality'. For Ughetti, the most important change to have taken place over the last decade has been making the transition from a student ensemble to a better-known professional group in their own right. It's also about perception, about gaining 'respect, and a sense of place in the industry.'

It hasn't been an easy journey, however. 'There were five people who were all equal members of the group, so it was very much a democratic process.' But getting five people to share a common artistic vision can be difficult. 'There tends to be a kind of middle ground, a compromise of the artistic goals. In 2002 we found we were burnt out as a group - financially, creatively… I was the only person willing to continue.'

The structure of Speak Percussion then became much more flexible. 'We're a collective, not a quartet,' Ughetti explains about the present setup, 'even the core players aren't always part of the line-up'.

This flexibility has made it easier to pursue one of their initial goals: to push the boundaries of what constitutes a percussion ensemble, and to collaborate with other artists - and not just musicians. 'I see it as kind of a research [project]... Speak Percussion is really about extending the genre… doing things that challenge the way we think about percussion.'

One advantage that percussion has over other instruments is its visual effectiveness: 'when we can see a sound being made very clearly, I think we have a better relationship to what is actually means'. And in many of Speak Percussion's projects, what a performance looks like is just as important as what it sounds like. The Glass Percussion Project, which has been going for several years, is a good example of this: a collaboration with glass artist Elaine Miles, which has taken place in several different locations, such as the Melbourne Recital Centre, and the Adelaide Festival Centre. It's part installation, part performance, and the art is in both the glass objects themselves, and in the music that the percussionists make with them. 'Percussion can be more than just music-making. Percussion is this world of beautiful objects… Even glass sculptural objects can be percussion, miniature sculpture can be percussion.'

A more unlikely combination of the senses is that of hearing and taste; yet earlier this year, for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Speak Percussion presented Pasta Percussion. Where is the common ground between such seemingly unrelated words? You have to go back a long way, but they actually share a proto-Indo-European root word, 'kw?t', meaning 'shake'. That, of course, is just the starting point - it turns out there are all kinds of ways to link the experience of watching pasta being prepared, eating it, and listening to percussion music.

But perhaps the most important collaborative work Speak Percussion has done, which Eugene Ughetti is keen to emphasise, is their commissioning of new music from Australian composers. More than 50 new works have been commissioned in their ten-year history, and they have established continuing relationships with several composers. The program for their current anniversary tour features two new works by Brendan Colbert, a composer who they first worked with way back in 2000. Anthony Pateras, who went to high school with Eugene Ughetti, also features on the program. Ughetti goes so far as to say that 'Speak Percussion is just as much about composers and sound artists as percussionists'.

Eugene Ughetti's enthusiasm for the possibilities of percussion reminds me of my own childhood passion: long before I took up trumpet and piano, I always used to dream of being a percussionist. When I was taken to orchestral concerts as a child, it was clear to me which musicians had the most interesting job. The strings, woodwind and brass would always be in the same seat, playing the same instrument - and often without making much of an impact on the overall sound. But up the back, the percussionists got to wander amongst all the most impressive-looking and impressive-sounding instruments. Watching their movements was enough to keep me entertained for hours.

Aged seven, I was obsessed with Carl Orff's Carmina Burana - not because of the words, which I knew nothing about, but just because of its sheer quantity of percussion instruments. I would spend entire afternoons looking around the kitchen, backyard and shed for my own percussion instruments. Then, seated behind my laundry-bucket-timpani and assorted crockery and cutlery, I would put on the record and patiently match each drum roll and bell stroke with one of my own.

There's something about percussion which conjures up that childlike excitement to an extent that no other instrument does - the discovery and exploration of new sounds, finding the music of unlikely objects.

Original Article

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Emerging Artists 2010-2011

24 Oct 2010

Speak Percussion is proud to announce the following students as our Emerging Artists for 2010-11.

Percussion
Madeleine Chwasta (VIC)
Rory Hannan (VIC)
Anna Ng (VIC)
Kaylie Melville (WA)
Lionel Pierson (WA)

Composition
Micah Brown (QLD)
James Paul (WA)
Owen Salome (NSW)
Emily Sheppard (VIC)
Chris Williams (NSW)

Speak would like to congratulate all students who applied for our program. All applicants were of an excellent standard and it has been a pleasure to get to know you and your work.

For your chance to be a part of this great program, learn about contemporary percussion music and observe the entire collaborative process between our young composers and percussionists, please apply for our Passive Participation stream. Applications close 22nd November, don't miss out!

For more information about the Emerging Artists Program, and Passive Participation, click here.

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Review: Speak Anniversary Tour

01 Oct 2010

ALL THAT GLITTERS, GROWLS AND ROARS
Speak Percussion [Eugene Ughetti, Peter Neville, Matthias Shack-Arnott, Leah Scholes]
10th anniversary concert,
Band Room, ANU, Sept 22, 2010

Article by Zsuzsi Soboslay

Contemporary percussion repertoire continually surprises—especially when it runs the gamut from its ancient, tribal origins, through to electronic interactions. This week’s concert by Melbourne group Speak Percussion reflected the fine intelligence of the group’s programming and its ongoing mentoring of process and both Australian and international composers.

If music could glisten, then Speaks’ performance of Warren Burt’s quartet, Vibraphone and tuning forks, achieves just that. Eugene Ughetti plays an elegant vibraphone against 39 micro-tonally tuned, hand-held aluminium tuning forks, struck one by one and then hovered in their sounding space. This is a dance of fireflies. The piece is a delicate interplay between alternate tuning systems--the tempered vibraphone against the forks’ ‘just’ intonations. A magician’s dance, my ears are folded from starburst into a dark cave and back again. The performance is delicate and exciting,

James Rushford’s piece Lucas Stumbles also travels through a varying sound- and land-scape, from a rat’s-toe scatter across drum membrane, through low rumbles deep within sound bores, to sudden gasps of silence.

Conlon Nanacarrow’s brief Player Piano Study was here arranged for 3 keyboards, each playing in different rhythmic structures [21 beats against 24 against 25]. I see/hear wind ruffling across desert sands. Sometimes I’ve watched children in a playroom also carrying such disparate rhythms. [They too can suddenly stop playing, at the same time.]

In Hypnogogics, composer Antony Pateras rolls out a background tape in one long tone which keeps rising. Ughetti works within a contained space [the width of his body], tripping mallets over a collection of tiny Turkish coffee glasses, ceramic bowls, steel rods, wood blocks, and crotales [small, tuned brass disks]. The crotales, sounding two octaves higher than seems possible, sound the splinterings of a mind only half-awake.

Pertout’s Exposiciones for solo glockenspiel and tape is an intelligent transposition by Peter Neville from an original score for toy piano. Neville recognised correspondences of tuning, rhythms and micro-tonalities. The click-tape [a computer-generated backing tape, which here marks time in tripping, alternating signatures] acts as a tabla-like ground. Pertout has elsewhere written for the 100-stringed santour; here, his understanding of Indian tonalities shines, but with a Western edge. The performance is sparkling, glittering, invigorating.

On a line of wood-blocks, Fritz Hauser’s quartet recreates the combination of joy and irritation one experiences on a hot night, overwhelmed by cicadas. Mesmerised by the piece’s subtle shifts of rhythm, we laugh at sudden moments of quiet, punctuated by an elegant page turn. Theatrical and gracious, this piece is an homage to the complex vivacity of the insect world.

SPEAK performed as part of their 10th anniversary concert tour, also conducting master classes at the ANU. They are offering mentorships to young percussion players and composers. For further information, go to www.speakpercussion.com.au.

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Commissions 10th Birthday.

12 Jan 2010

Anthony Pateras, Thomas Meadowcroft, Luke Paulding, Warren Burt, Mark Pollard and Andrew Byrne are all composing new works for us to be premiered in our Anniversary year. Stay tuned for performances of these works, we will be taking the Warren Burt "Vibraphone and Tuning Forks" on tour across Australia and the new Anthony Pateras percussion 12tet will be featured in our Birthday Concerts which will be part of opening night at the Mona Foma Festival 2011 in Hobart.

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Speak Board

12 Sep 2009

Speak Percussion's board:
Chair - Owen McKern
Deputy Chair - Elizabeth Tupper
Treasurer - Peter McCoy
Secretary - Andrew Owen Hillier
Colin Simpson
Hugh Basset
Gary France
John Arcaro

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