Experience sonic innovation as Displaced Bodies unites two of Melbourne’s cutting-edge ensembles. Ossicle Duo, an award-winning trombone-percussion ensemble, pushes boundaries with their technically refined and high-energy exploratory art music. Rubiks Collective, a dynamic ensemble of Australia’s most versatile young performers, take audiences on a sonic journey through their ‘incredibly personal, strangely spiritual and ultimately deeply touching’ performances. Together, they fearlessly explore the boundaries of sound in the highly anticipated world premiere of Jakob Bragg’s acclaimed composition, ‘Displaced Bodies, Weapons of Action,’ a recipient of the prestigious Melbourne Recital Centre & Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Composition Award.

Full program and tickets available here.

Music at McClelland is held on the third Sunday of the month, 2–4pm, and features exceptional performers from across Victoria.

In Assemblage, Speak's Assistant Artistic Director Kaylie Melville showcases works at the forefront of post-instrumental practice - a movement revealing the hidden musical potential in everyday objects. Plants, wine glasses, alarm clocks and saw blades sit alongside an array of traditional percussion instruments, creating a universe of endless sonic possibilities.

Full program and tickets available here.

Celebrating world premieres by internationally recognised art music specialists Maria Kaoutzani and Alice Chance, this performance explores the intricacies between love, intergenerational relationships and a modern-day perception of ‘home’. Maria Kaoutzani interrogates her personal experiences of love and belonging regarding intimate relationships and nationalistic identity in Five Love Songs. Alice Chance’s ‘mother-daughter motet’ Heirloom speaks to complex layers of history, the strength of family ties, and the fragility of intergenerational memories, featuring the recorded voices of three generations of women from the same family line.

Full program and tickets available here.

An immersive percussive event that interweaves four new Australian compositions into a seamless exhalation of spatialized sound. Featuring 50+ mobilized drummers and wind players and an ensemble of 12 leading percussionists, this performance bleeds across three floors and into the magnificent acoustics of the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, showcasing the music of acclaimed composers Cathy Milliken, Erkki Veltheim, Damien Ricketson and Thomas Meadowcroft. Sonic Eclipse encourages the audience to listen multi-sensorially: with their eyes, bodies and ears.

Full program and tickets are available here.

Join Rubiks and Pythia Prize winner Dr Felicity Wilcox for the launch of our 'Sound Fields' music video!

The evening will include a Q&A with the ensemble and composer about their experiences creating this new work, the first screening of the Sound Fields video, and a glass of wine to toast to our 2021 Pythia Prize winner.

This event is free but places are limited. Please RSVP here or by emailing hello@rubikscollective.com.

Rubiks takes you on a journey across the Pacific, celebrating our long-standing collaboration with USA new music laboratory Black House Collective. Featuring three world premieres commissioned by BHC, Futures Exchange pays homage to our creative partners in the US and our formative roots as an ensemble. 

Full program and tickets are available here.

Tin is the traditional metal marking a 10-year anniversary. So, too, is it the flashy and proud symbol of a decade of percussion at ANAM. When the percussion program launched in 2013, ANAM achieved their goal of offering training on every orchestral instrument. To celebrate, ANAM’s percussion musicians, faculty, and alumni - led by Head of Percussion, Peter Neville - present a kaleidoscopic concert series.

Full program and tickets are available here.

Rubiks presents two fun-filled workshops for 4-8 year olds as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre's Music Play Families Festival 2023.

In these interactive sessions each participant is invited to create their very own musical score, which will then be performed by Rubiks Collective with their instruments spanning flute, cello, clarinet and percussion.

A wonderful journey of art, music and play, this creative session is fun for everyone. Tickets admit one child and one guardian.

Session times: 10:30am & 11:45am
Duration: 45 minutes

March Static is an immersive site-specific mobile work for massed musicians, that reframes the marching band phenomenon as a celebration of community gathering around peace, over representations of military might.

Composed by Thomas Meadowcroft (AU/DE) and led by new music luminaries Speak Percussion, March Static brings together more than 50 local student and community musicians to collaborate with visiting Festival artists, creating a gentle spectrum of choreographed sound to envelop its listeners. The assembled musicians will move in and around the audience as they perform, reframing the performer-audience relationship while simultaneously challenging the traditional performance format of marching bands. Melding ethereal chords with fragments of marching percussion motifs against the backdrop of tranquil beachside sounds, this morning performance kicks off the Festival weekend with a relaxing experience for the whole family.

A unique, premiere musical performance, The Red Vacuum is a structured improvisation based on a story of the same name written by Gelareh Pour. It focuses on the common lives of Iranian families as they experience war with Iraq in the 1980s.

The story centres around a young boy’s fascination with household items as toys, and how his joy and exploration unwittingly create havoc as his family frantically organise themselves to vacate at the sound of air-raid sirens.

The Red Vacuum features some of Australia’s most renowned experimental musicians: Gelareh Pour – Persian Kamancheh, Qeychak and Voice; Peter Knight – Trumpet and Electronics; Kaylie Melville – Percussion; and Brian O’Dwyer – Drum Kit.

Presented by 3MBS, Music, She Wrote exists to tell women's stories in their own musical voices. Since its inception in 2021, the festival has proudly presented the finest local chamber musicians in diverse programs of classical, jazz, and folk music by female composers.

Curated by Artistic Director, Katie Yap, this year's festival revolves around the theme of cutting loose, and the courage required to speak up in an authentic voice.

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CONCERT 2: BREAKING STEP
Rubiks Collective

The festival’s central concert marks the act of breaking step, of venturing out from the status quo. Melbourne’s beloved contemporary art music ensemble Rubiks Collective has championed female composers since their inception in 2015, through their own concerts and the Pythia Prize, a composition prize specifically for women composers.

Rubiks brings their signature dynamism and vivacity to Chapter House, with the vibrant combination of piano, percussion, cello and flute. With a particular interest in storytelling and cross-art collaboration, Rubiks has quickly established a reputation for excellence, delighting audiences with their unique programming and dazzling virtuosity.

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PROGRAM
Anna Clyne - Fits and Starts
Samantha Wolf - Want Not
Julia Wolfe - East Broadway
Molly Joyce - Less Is More
Leah Blankendaal - Beacon
Gemma Peacocke - Sky-Fields

In-venue and Digital tickets are available at musicshewrote.com.au

They Swim Through Air showcases the exuberance, imagination and artistry of new music creators from Australia and beyond with a program that reflects on the rituals and processes of life.

Inspired by Tolkien’s use of the term ‘sky-fields’ in Lord of the Rings, Gemma Peacocke reflects on the travels of the sun and the power of hope, while Leah Blankendaal’s Beacon explores how memories are retained within the body over a lifetime.

Rubiks’ virtuosic playfulness comes to the fore in Jessie Marino’s The Whale Is a Capital Fish, a celebration of the ritual absurdity and technical mastery exhibited in everyday activities. The program finishes with the premiere of a new work from the winner of Rubiks’ 2021 Pythia Prize.

6pm Wednesday 26 October
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre

In this exquisite and richly historic venue new to the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, experience the stunning Federation Handbells in an immersive and intimate performance crafted by Speak Percussion and 12 young performers from Southwest Victoria, brought together in partnership with One Day Studios Warrnambool.

Bell Curve is a work for spatialised bell players, composed by Artistic Director of Speak Percussion, Eugene Ughetti. Through the use of click track technology, the players move seamlessly in and out of sync from stunningly complex rhythms to perfect unisons. A massed sound event unfolds across the beautifully restored St Brigid’s Church, a world revealed between the attacks and beating patterns of tuned bell resonance.

Port Fairy Spring Music Festival
9:30am Saturday 15 October - Brunch with St Brigid
2:15pm Saturday 15 October - Bell Curve 2
3:45pm Saturday 15 October - Bell Curve 3

Cosmic Time is a performance work co-created by visual artist Michaela Gleave, composer Amanda Cole and percussionist Louise Devenish. The work takes concepts of time on a cosmological scale as a point of departure.

Unfolding over 40 minutes, Cosmic Time explores representations of time ranging from the endless circling of planetary forms, to measures of time on Earth such as human breath and the fluttering heartbeats of desert mice, as well as abstractions of dissolving consciousness.

Boom! International Festival of Percussion
7:30pm Thursday 6 October
Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre

Rubiks Collective perform as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Making Waves Workshop Series.

In a three-part series, this Making Waves Workshop features Rubiks Collective, exploring various compositional styles and techniques in a workshop presented in partnership with Virtual School Victoria. These workshops are especially designed for VCE music students, but are open to all budding composers.

This series is supported by the Department of Education’s Strategic Partnership Program and the Hugh Williamson Foundation.

10:30am Tuesday 23 August
Primrose Potter Salon, Melbourne Recital Centre
This event is free to attend however tickets are required.

Filament is a showcase of artistic compositional voices in Post Instrumental Practice, a boundary-breaking field of contemporary percussion music.

In a program of Australian and world premieres, Speak Percussion present works by Cathy Van Eck, Josephine Macken, Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and Andreas E. Frank. Focusing on electronics, bespoke instruments and simple everyday objects – a plant, a hairdryer, a quartet of windshield wiper motors.

An enthralling event that pushes the bounds of musical philosophies and unexpected sound worlds.

Alice Chance’s delicate Heirloom parallels the beauty and difficulty of moving time, while Annie Hsieh’s Quietude pauses the mind through a tinkling pallet of delicate glass objects. The concert culminates in the world premiere of a new work for the virtuosic forces of these two combined ensembles by rising Australian composer Jakob Bragg, recipient of the 2019 University of Melbourne Commission Award.

Alice Chance - Heirloom
Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh - Quietude
Andrew Aronowicz - new work
Jakob Bragg - Displaced bodies, weapons of action

SHARING SPACES is a collection of new music works made by, with and for Australian women. Inspired by poetry, locations, environments and natural phenomena, this collection features a suite of three new works titled SHARING SPACES by Kezia Yap, made in collaboration with Flora Wong, Hannah Reardon-Smith, Kaylie Melville and Madi Chwasta and inspired by poetry by Eileen Chong across Jagera, Yuggera, Turrbal (Meanjin/Brisbane), Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung (Naarm/Melbourne) lands, and a new work by Alexis Weaver and Jessica Scott on Gadigal land (Eora/Warrang/Sydney).

SHARING SPACES will be premiered online at 7pm AEST on Sunday the 27th of June. This project is generously supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Parrwang Lifts the Sky, by Yorta Yorta soprano and composer Deborah Cheetham, tells of how the first sunrise came about, one of the creation stories that form a part of the rich oral history of the Wathaurong people of Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula.

Saturday 19 June, 2pm - Digital Access Performance

‘Threshold’ is a music work by Composer Noemi Liba Friedman commissioned by The Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne specifically for the microtonal Federation Handbells, percussion and voices, to be premiered as part of Multivocal, currently showing at the Old Quad Treasury gallery.

It will be performed in surround sound, integrating elements of Middle Eastern quarter-tone scales into an evocative and atmospheric contemporary new music work to welcome asylum seekers and immigrants arriving here from a life impacted by persecution or war.

‘What has been long neglected cannot be restored immediately.’ Eve Belgarian, Five Things.

Last year, our relationships with natural, domestic and digital spaces changed abruptly. This Soft Eclipse is a program that reflects on our capacity to endure, restore and evolve. In a sonic and visual journey touching on climate change, pop culture and musical icons, Rubiks presents works by new music luminaries Eve Belgarian and Nicole Lizée, and premieres from two of the world’s most adventurous young compositional voices – including the winners of the 2019 Pythia Prize and 2020 Bouman Fellowship.

Akari Komura - In the language of the bloom
Holly Harrison - Frogstomp
Nicole Lizée - Softcore
Eve Belgarian - Five Things
Bianca Gannon - new work

Cosmic Time is a major new performance work by artist Michaela Gleave. The project considers time on a cosmological scale, inviting audiences on a guided journey through the depths of existence. Limited to an audience of just 40 people.

The project considers time on a cosmological scale, inviting audiences on a guided journey into the depths of existence. Performed on metallic percussion instruments, four musicians dressed as spirits of the multiverse evoke sensations and rhythms scaling from the fall-out of the big bang; the endless circling of planetary forms; the fluttering heartbeats of desert mice; and the dissolve of consciousness into the astral plane.

Ticket includes entry to the Museum anytime from 3pm-5pm for TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters, curated by Nina Miall.

A complimentary refreshment awaits you 5pm - 6pm. Performance at 6pm

You're invited to the launch of Rubiks' new music video for 'Waiting'. Join Rubiks and 2018 Pythia Prize winner Christine McCombe for a behind-the-scenes chat with the composer and a glass of wine with some excellent company. 🥂

This is a free event but bookings are essential. Please book at Eventbrite.