METEOR/sketches of Brazil

PRESENTED IN COLLABORATION WITH ASTRA MUSIC
Supported by Revive Live through the Australian Government and the Robert Salzer Foundation

BOLT STRING QUARTET
CATRINA SEIFFERT and VICTORIA BILOGAN

SCHEDULE

Sunday 19 October
BOLT String Quartet: 3pm
Catrina Seiffert (voice) and Victoria Bilogan (voice & piano): 4pm

Venue
JOLTED Arts Space
342 High Street, Northcote

$15 / $10
Buy tickets at the door or online here. Cards and cash accepted.

Catrina Seiffert and Victoria Bilogan

Over two concerts at Jolted Arts Space, four members of the Astra Choir step beyond their solo and choral roles there to reveal their talents in collaborative performances, alongside new string and wind works from Jolt ensembles.

In this program, Catrina Seiffert (voice and piano) and Victoria Bilogan (piano and visual artist) share their artistry in Sketches of Brazil — a performance shaped by their recent travels through this vibrant and musically rich country, where song infuses everyday life.

Music by bossa nova pioneer Antônio Carlos Jobim (1927–1994) and Chiquinha (Francisca) Gonzaga (1847–1935) — one of Brazil’s first professional female composers — is paired with Heitor Villa-Lobos’s (1887–1959) Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4, a fusion of Bach’s counterpoint with the melodies and rhythms of Brazil.

Complementing the sounds are Victoria’s visual sketches of Brazilian life: portraits of musicians and workers, and scenes from markets, beaches, concert halls.

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BOLT STRING QUARTET

On the back of significant success in Japan at the Yokohama International Performing Arts Meeting 2024 at BankART Station, BOLT String Quartet with Australian musicians will perform new works by James Hullick. The Meteor programme is an extension beyond the ideas of the YPAM project, exploring the interplay between noise and gestural music.

The Meteor string quartet was written somewhere between 1998 and 2000. I was living overseas in 1998 (Europe) and 1999 (Canada) and then returned to Gippsland in 2000 to care for my ailing mother. I guess it was partly due to my responsibilities of caring for my mother, that the quartet fell by the wayside. It was finished in grey led, but never written up as a final score.

Recently the quartet, and several other string quartets surfaced again, and so I endeavoured to restore the work ready for today’s concert. A premier – 25 years after the work was written.

The name Meteor was only applied to the quartet in the lead up to this concert. The work is not about some kind of dystopian meteor impact. The title refers to the conceptual design of the work: that notes exist in the space of silence. Within this space some notes collide, others fall into resonant orbits. At least some of the time of the composing of the work would have been spent looking out the window from my desk at Mount Baw Baw rising up above Blue Rock Dam. Space, weather, natural forces. The eons that cause a mountain to rise. Sea shells found far from the sea.

There is an entropic sorrow that hangs upon this quartet. My mother did not survive. And that is a part of the sorrow, but there lies a deeper sorrow within this work.  Recently, at Astra concerts, I have been delighted to be an audience member within a community of music lovers and music makers. Such a precious and fragile community it is. Within this community are many composers just like me – all pouring their life essence into their work: with honesty and diligence. They write because they must. There is no huge reward for this an art.

All of these composers will have their own folders full of Meteor compositions: great works that simply never saw the light of day. I think of that boy who wrote Meteor and how tough composing was for him. I see his dogged mind. I hear other musicians at the time criticise him for his efforts, as they persistently did. People say the most ridiculous things about music without actually listening to it.

That boy did not survive. He is well dead now – 25 years dead -, now replaced by his fatherly self: literally a father of two daughters.

So my Dad-Self walked in and fixed up the quartet – and other works too. Some of you may be haunted by these works in the years to come, if anything but to honour all the young composers out there who still get a regular kick in the teeth from life.

After recovering from the psychic shock of dealing with this work, I came to hear the piece differently. Perhaps the Meteor string quartet was inevitable. Was it always the case that this work would be lobbed across decades to be heard for the first time in 2025, like a message in a bottle that simply says: ‘Now’.

The second work offered today had a different life. Small Birds Dancing (2016) was written for the Silo String Quartet. The piece was written while the musicians were recording other string quartet works of mine. To be clear: Small Birds Dancing was written in the recording studio, with the musicians present, as a deliberate conceptual act. The work was immediately heard (unlike Meteor), although the recording itself was never released. Again with the barriers. It was impossible to find agreeable record labels at the time. There can be so many roadblocks to art music. We all know it, but that doesn’t reduce the pain-in-ass factor. Of course, I can be my own worst roadblock. In the end, it is still on me if I am going to get compositions heard.

This last sentence explains fully why you are hearing what you are hearing today. I pushed with much force, just as my mother said I must.

And thank you Bandcamp. I’d be stuffed without it. If you want to hear more of what I do, and what the BOLT Ensemble does, then go to:

https://hullickstudios.bandcamp.com/

I arrive in thought now at the BOLT Ensemble, and three of the BOLT Ensemble members Andrea Keeble, Zac Johnston and Phoebe Green, who have been working with me in BOLT for many years now. They have breathed fertile life into many of my works over many years and I am so grateful to them. And I also welcome James Churchill who has elegantly stepped into the ensemble, performing with us for the first time. There is no Meteor without these great artists: they too must share the will to have sounds heard, and it is their artistry that finishes the composition. A Meteor string quartet sitting in a folder on shelf does not exist. It is not a composition. Only when the forest dwellers find the fallen tree, does the tree fall become manifest.

We are, therefore, all on this Raft of the Medusa together, are we not? Our culture, our community, does not exist until we are found. And then heard.

This might be why John Cage said that composition is ‘sounds heard.’

I offer that as a community we a have a duty of care: collectively we are custodians of our art music. We must remain relentless like the meteor until our sounds are heard.

For this event the following BOLT musicians will be performing:

Phoebe Green (viola)
Zac Johnston (violin)
Andrea Keeble (violin)
James Churchill (cello)

SUPPORTED BY

This series is supported by Revive Live – an Australian Government Initiative. Supported by The Robert Salzer Foundation