A COMPOSER, musical director, choir master and conductor walk into a bar.
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It could be the start of a joke (“Are you out of your octave?”), the quartet could break into a cappella barbershop harmonies, but it is the prelude to the end to a symphony.
Composer Matthew Dewey, musical director Sean O’Boyle, conductor Gordon Hamilton and choir master Warwick Tyrell met yesterday at the Red Earth Hotel, Rodeo Drive, to discuss Mount Isa Symphony Orchestra’s debut.
The Isa is home to a new ensemble, which brings together musicians from across the North West, some of whom have recently picked up their instruments and others not for decades. It will take its first bows on Thursday and Friday nights with a commissioned work, Symphony of the Inland Sea, in two free concerts at the Civic Centre, in West St.
For O’Boyle, this week was like placing the final pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He has had Dewey’s “wonderful” score from the start, but with the last few pieces coming together – guest soloists, musicians like violinist Ian Cooper, flying into the city, disparate groups are collecting – the majesty of the work is becoming apparent. At the final rehearsal, when all inputs are assembled, the complete work will be elevated to be greater than its parts.
O’Boyle, 51, currently divides his time between the US, where he is the artist-lecturer in composition with his wife Suzanne Kompass, a soprano and voice teacher, at Moravian College, in Pennsylvania (75 minutes south-west of New York) and Australia, where he is chief arranger and composer-in-residence of the Queensland Pops Orchestra.
He is no stranger to the Isa, having visited before with Kompass in 2012 and the Queensland Ballet’s Cloudland travelling production. O’Boyle was similarly impressed with the North Western landscape, the inspiration for Symphony of the Inland Sea.
“The colour, the space, is overwhelming when you fly in, especially coming from the largest urban landscape (New York).”
“Have you had rain recently?” O’Boyle asked, enthusing about the greening of the bush.
The Melbourne native, who became a Member of the Order of Australia last January 26 for ‘‘significant service to music as a composer, conductor, musician, performer and musical director”, has recorded or collaborated with many Australian and foreign orchestras, including the Royal Philharmonic, or artists, such as pop band The Whitlams, guitarist Tommy Emmanuel, and operatic soprano Yvonne Kenny and baritone Teddy Tahu-Rhodes.
O’Boyle is known for fusing the old with the new, such as the music of indigenous Australia to jazz clarinet, or seemingly incomparable, writing and arranging music for the 2009 Ashes cricket series.
He is well versed with bringing new works to fruition. In Seattle, he debuted last October a new work Portraits of Immortal Love with the profoundly deaf Scottish percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie.
O’Boyle thought it important for young musicians to be involved in bringing new works to life.
“When I was a young musician, we thought it had all been written,” he said.