Sunday, 15th of October, 2000

I'm just back from a concert by the Australia Ensemble – their last subscription concert of the year. I'm so used to going to rock gigs and dance parties/clubs these days that I almost wrote "back from an Australia Ensemble gig". I'm sure they wouldn't mind.
The first piece was Beethoven's Septet, written in 1800. The second was Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), written in 1900. Getting the picture?
Well, I'm not what one would call a bit Beethoven fan; he bores me to tears generally, whilst simultaneously beating me over the head with an anvil… *ahem* So I continued to read the utterly brilliant Crescent City Rhapsody by Kathleen Ann Goonan, as discreetly as I could.
Schönberg? Well it all depends; I acknowledge that Verklärte Nacht is a very important piece of music. And the first page or so is utterly and pristinely beautiful. After that he goes all Wagnerian-late-romantic and I can't stand the fucking thing, it gives me a headache.
My favourite 1900 composition is Mahler's 4th Symphony – but then Mahler is just the greatest, in my oh-so-humble opinion…

The last piece, written in 2000, was a new commission by the wonderful and delightful Australian composer Martin Wesley-Smith called fin/début. Commissioned, obviously, to represent in some way the turn of the millenium, the piece combined M W-S's usual humour and cleverness with a beautiful maturity that really impressed and moved the listeners (at least those with open enough minds). The last movement was multi-media, with a CD-ROM playing a beautifully vocodered computer voice and animated text on a screen behind the players; there was frequent quotation from both the previous works among many others…

As well as being a fantastic composer (one of my favourite Australian composers, along with Nigel Westlake) and a pioneer of computer music in Australia (he was using Fairlight synthesisers – really early digital sampling musical instruments – way back in the '70s, and founded the seminal computer music/audio-visual group watt in 1976), Martin is a tireless campaigner for a free East Timor. He and his two brothers (Peter, a lawyer and law scholar who writes or co-writes dazzlingly witty, clever and poignant librettos for Michael, and Rob, a political activist and agricultural scientist) have been involved with human rights campaigning in East Timor since the mid-'70s, well before it had any mainstream media attention; they also direct their considerable talents and energy to environmental causes and other human rights issues.

After the concert I was chatting to Jed Wesley-Smith, Martin's son, who I know from his days playing bass in legendary Sydney band The Strange – their singer Tim Hall sang and played guitar in the Whitlams for a while (Eternal Nightcap era – you know the Tangled Up In Blue cover? That's Timmy singing), and their drummer Joe Accaria has played with, well, just about everybody… Tim's latest project, with Ian Shadwell from Cactus Child, is an insanely electro pop thing called Shakra Diva. Look out for them soon (now?!) with FourPlay playing strings of course.
Jed's not playing much these days as he's got two kiddies to bring up.

Totally legendary family. Go check out Martin's webpages and buy his CDs!

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