The North West’s musicians are tuning and polishing their instruments in nervous preparation for next month’s symphonic debut.

Queensland Music Festival artistic director James Morrison last week breezed into town to check their progress and reinsure their jitters.

Better known as a jazz trumpeter, Morrison met organisers in the music room of St Joseph’s Primary School to bolster their spirits last Tuesday.

He heard parts of the orchestra at the Buffs Club later that evening when Morrison presented the group at the launch of Mount Isa Celebrate.

A string of free events next month plans to bring together performing and visual artists, instrumentalists and singers native to the city. 

Mayor Tony McGrady said it was proof that Mount Isa was a city of culture with the arts playing a major role how the community expressed and entertained itself.

To further challenge the notion of it as a blue-collar town, Morrison challenged year 10 Spinifex State College student Matthew Cobden to a rematch of their trumpet duel two years ago.

The pair blew and blew, matching one another note for note.

After their jam, Matthew was breathless in more way than one.

He told the North West Star Morrison had been his inspiration ever since he picked up a trumpet, and to share the stage with his hero was “fantastic”.

Morrison said Matthew was an example of the talents the orchestra had uncovered and would unearth.

Three free concerts next month will announce to the world Isa’s newest and one of its most isolated orchestras, simultaneously dispelling the idea that Mount Isa is just a mining community.

Morrison will be joined on stage by vocalist Emma Pask, pianist Ambre Hammond, violinist Ian Cooper and the John Morrison Trio.

Morrison said the aim of the biennial QMF, a state government initiative that began in 1999, was to take music to the far flung corners of the state, including sending classical pianist Simon Tedeschi on a tour of remote communities, such as Normanton and Birdsville.

He told Tedeschi, whose previous smallest audience had been in Brisbane, he now could boost that one of his concerts drew all of a town’s inhabitants.

While previous Mount Isa productions hinged around gimmicks, such as utes and bobcats, Morrison decided this time the town needed to concentrate on something that was purely musical and could be built upon for future generations.

QMF development director Simon Buchanan (and the orchestra’s first violinist) said, while ute registrations jumped after the last festival two years ago, the number of students wanting to learn an instrument also rose dramatically.

The suggestion that there would be enough to fill an orchestra was made, and it was agreed one would give budding and established musicians a target to attain.

The band of more than four dozen members will be joined for the concert by professional musicians from the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and others brought in.

The three events planned for next month include two public concerts on the evenings of Thursday, July 23, and Friday, July 24, at the Mount Isa Civic Centre, in West Street, and an afternoon school concert on the Thursday at the same venue.

The concerts also will end with the premiere of a work inspired by the outback landscape, Symphony of the Inland Sea by Australian composer Matthew Dewey.

To the organisers at their Tuesday afternoon meeting, Morrison likened the mounting excitement and anticipation to building a bonfire.

The hours of gathering and stacking will be unknown to the intended audience, who will never know of the practice, trials and traumas involved in the concerts, only the enjoyment of the event.

And like a bonfire, the blaze will be short-lived but memorable.

Like a restaurateur, organisers are involved in detailed preparations to whet the appetite of the audience and heighten their experience.

Central to the evening is the North West’s landscape.

Area artists are preparing a photographic display for the centre’s foyer and decorations for the hall.

A 130-plus voice choir drawn from the city’s students and adult singers under the leadership of choral master Gordon Hamilton will wear scarves depicting the colours of raw and processed copper.

Describing music in words has the same effect as dissecting an inflated balloon.

But, the North West Star canvassed several opinions of the symphony to better satisfy its curiosity.

QMF project co-ordinator (and the orchestra’s second violinist) Katharina Bernard heard pieces of the work as she rehearsed her section.

If German philosopher Goethe’s description of architecture being “frozen music”, then this work was, Ms Bernard said, “frozen landscape”.

The 22-minute composition was filmic, the composer told the North West Star.

Listeners should expect elements of the best film soundtrack music, Dewey said, promising an “emotional, epic and exciting event”.

The composition, which took him several months to complete, was inspired by landmarks, such as Lake Moondarra, and tries to aurally depict the Outback’s “harshness, softness and beauty,’’ which the Hobart-born composer only experienced last year on his first trip to inland Australia.

Used to his lush home island, Dewey was captivated by the North West’s beauty, taken by its “big sky” and said it was best similarly described by British adventurer T.E. Lawrence (better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”) in his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom of the Arabian Desert as the “anvil of the sun”.

Morrison is confident that the orchestra will shine on the night.

He told organisers at the Tuesday meeting of his own stage fright as a seven-year-old playing the cornet in the school band at assembles.

Sick to the stomach before each performance because he was scared of making an error and embarrassing himself in front of the school, he was told by a school stalwart to forget the score, “play the bits you do know, just like everybody else”.

With the realisation that everybody else had trouble remembering the correct notation and was improvising, he relaxed, and a career of noodling was embarked upon.

Tickets for the event can be booked online at the festival website, qmf.org.au.

However, be quick because the hall has limited seating.