BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Melbourne Recital Centre describes its upcoming event with Phonetic Orchestra as “an audio-visual journey through spaces physical, digital and imagined”. On this journey, you’ll travel alongside musicians who unite from across the continents. Together, they design a rare environment in which each artist is free to express their own musical ideas — even if they’re not performing in the same room. Even if they’re not performing in the same time zone.
Double bassist Jonathan Heilbron — who launched the Phonetic Orchestra with his friends Callum G’Froerer and Reuben Lewis (also performing at this event) — has worked on a collaborative new composition called Tower Lake Temple. The APRA Art Music Award-winning team behind Silent Towns is gearing up to present music notated and improvised, physical and digital, local and international — all in real time. Jonathan talks us through the Tower Lake Temple backstory before the 15 August event in Elisabeth Murdoch Hall.
Jonathan, take us back a bit to when you founded the Phonetic Orchestra. What did you want to put out into the world, and why?
Phonetic Orchestra was formed around 10 years ago, when many of its members, myself included, were in their early 20s. At the time, we were all inspired by the local experimental and improvised music scene, as well as similarly exciting music happening in other parts of the country.
In particular, we had a desire to explore the potential of large ensemble improvisation while also trying to find ways to disrupt our own habits and assumptions about what music could be.
In a way, we were all challenging ourselves to find a new and fundamentally collective mode of music-making rooted in friendship, experimentation, and trust. While our ideas about almost everything have probably changed since those early days, I think that spirit still persists in everything we do as a group today.
I feel like the Phonetic Orchestra’s international scope is a pretty solid reflection of the direction you’ve personally taken in music — you perform across Europe, Australia, America. What interests you about cross-border collaboration and live performance?
I have been very fortunate to lead a diverse creative life, and my work as a musician has brought me into contact with places, people, and ideas that continue to have an immense impact on me.
At the same time, I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been educated, in the loose sense, in Australia, where I was supported and encouraged to experiment, fail, and build deep creative and personal partnerships through music. This spirit is something I try to bring to every collaboration, be it in Australia or elsewhere.
Tower Lake Temple reunites your ensemble in Australia and elsewhere — and the context of the pandemic. How has the pandemic uprooted Phonetic Orchestra? Or is a work like this a reflection of the way you’ve confronted change?
The pandemic forced me, like many people, to reevaluate the things, people, and places most important me. The seemingly endless lockdowns experienced in parts of Germany and Australia added to this feeling of life and time being suspended in air, with things either not changing at all or getting worse.
As an ensemble and group of friends, we wanted to make a concerted effort to circumvent those limitations on social and creative life, and the result of this collective effort was our 24-hour livestream Silent Towns.
As several of Phonetic Orchestra’s members have relocated to other parts of Australia and Europe, real-time international collaboration has been a really important tool for keeping us connected musically and personally, while also allowing us to push ourselves into new creative territory, and I think these telematic explorations will be a lasting legacy of the pandemic in our practice as a group in the years to come.
So what’s the meaning of Tower Lake Temple?
As the piece has been collaboratively composed by Phonetic Orchestra over an extended period, it’s difficult to tie the title directly to any concrete musical content. Generally speaking, I really love titles that allude to, or evoke, without being prescriptive: I find that this opens up a space for listeners to make their own connections, and have their own associations and ‘play’ with what they are hearing, seeing, and reading in real-time. Tower Lake Temple belongs to this category.
What I will say about the music in relation to the title is that it deals with ‘sharing space’ in an expanded sense — but this could be one of many possible connections!
You’re a double bassist as well as the founder of this ensemble, and the composer of its work. How does each perspective make its way into your composition process?
I established the group with my friends Callum G’Froerer and Reuben Lewis, and there was a collective spirit behind everything we did right from the earliest rehearsals and performances. While I continue to write music for the group, we have worked hard to develop a fundamentally collaborative approach to composition.
I think what ties this to my composing activities outside of Phonetic Orchestra is that I write music exclusively with particular people in mind, and try to celebrate the inspirational people in my life who happen to be musicians by creating opportunities and spaces to create music with them.
It’s difficult for me to accurately trace the influence of my practice as a double bassist on my approach to composition. I think beyond any kind of aesthetic factors — like a tendency towards microtonality or long tones, or a love of bowed string instruments — my experience as a performer means I am steeped in the concrete realities of musical experience and the people and spaces that shape it. As a result, I see composition as a way of choreographing performances, and music as something that exists more in space and time than on the page of a score.
Phonetic Orchestra, so your website says, explores “the relationship between notation and sound…composition and improvisation”. How can we see these ideas emerge in your latest offering?
Tower Lake Temple features everything from totally free improvisation to very precisely notated music, and draws from our collective history working within and between these fields. Since Phonetic Orchestra was founded, we have been looking for ways to focus on and celebrate what is possible when ideas from a broad range of individual musical practices are combined.
What has been really interesting for me is seeing the ways in which our combined work has changed and developed as we all develop as musicians and human beings. These changes are always reflected in the way we listen, write, and create music.
With collaboration so much a part of your practice, how would you describe the way you worked with the other artists in Phonetic Orchestra to realise your ideas?
Phonetic Orchestra always works collaboratively to shape our performances, and this collaborative work can manifest in several ways. For example, some of our sleep concerts, which begin around midnight and finish with the sunrise, have featured individual pieces by members of the group, long improvisations, co-composed pieces, or a combination all of these simultaneously. Developing Tower Lake Temple is the same in that we aim to create a space where musical ideas can be suggested and tested within an environment of openness and trust.
This process is the opposite of streamlined, and it is a process of constant negotiation. But I think it’s also what makes the group, and the work we do, so meaningful to us and hopefully our audiences.
I like the idea expressed in the Melbourne Recital Centre’s listing — that Tower Lake Temple will “redefine the possibilities of collective music-making”. How exactly does your work combine audio with visual; physical with digital?
In the depths of the 2021 lockdowns, Phonetic Orchestra began using JackTrip software, which allowed us to rehearse together across vast distances with minimal lag or quality loss in the audio signal. This technology opened up some interesting discussions around what it meant to share musical experiences in space, what defines ‘presence’, and how the technology simultaneously accentuated a collective awareness of distance and dislocation while also making us feel somehow more connected. It would also be remiss of me at this point not to acknowledge the enormous help and guidance we’ve received in the area of this new technology from Aaron Wyatt, who continues to play an essential role in our activities that utilise JackTrip technology.
In addition to the Australian contingent of Phonetic Orchestra performing live in the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, Tower Lake Temple features a live audio-visual feed from Berlin straight to the stage at MRC as well as visuals produced by our collaborator Gregory Oke. The music and images will combine to expand on the complicated experience of what could be named the ‘remote intimacy’ brought about by the pandemic and communication technologies in general.
What final message would you like to send to those thinking about rocking up to the Melbourne Recital Centre?
I suppose my message to anyone considering coming to our show is that, among many other things, it’s intended as a celebration: of connecting, creating together, searching for new ways to express collective feelings and ideas, and of being together, which is something I think we’re all grateful for now more than ever.
Melbourne Recital Centre presents Tower Lake Temple with Phonetic Orchestra at 7.30pm August 15.
Featured image credit Cristina Marx.
