Trailblazers
Trailblazers was a performance for Horizon Festival in 2017 at the USC Art Gallery, Sippy Downs, featuring signature circus collaborative piece with Vulcana Women’s Circus on Nicole Murphy’s Surface 2.. Muses Trio were joined by guest circus artists Bianca Mackail and Mayu Muto, directed by Celia White AD of Vulcana Women’s Circus, offering adventurous audiences a secret glimpse into the current lives and processes of women in the current classical music industry.
In this show, Muses Trio presented seven leading women composers forging ahead in their field representing the strength, vitality and diversity of contemporary composition across the globe. The majority of these works received their Queensland Premiere performance at this event. The concert explores ways to deepen audience engagement and understanding of what it is to be a composer and a creative woman.
Muses first performed the Trailblazers program as ensemble-in-residence at the inaugural Women in the Creative Arts Conference at Australian National University, Canberra, directed by Natalie Williams. For both these events, Muses travelled with pianist Therese’s baby son, born a month earlier.
Featured Composers
Snowy Landscape
Written for Trio Morisot, Snowy Landscape was inspired by Berthe Morisot’s 1880 impressionistic watercolor “Paysgae de neige”. The music depicts the icy and bleak scenery with harmonics on the strings and bare open fifths on the piano at the beginning. The violin and cello enter with expressive lyrical melodic lines on top of a chain of broken figurations of the piano, which turns into a more rhythmic, chordal, tense and passionate middle section, which is later followed by a melancholic passage bringing back the opening icy and bleak mood.
Repertoire
Spinning Top, Nicole Murphy (AUS)
Flash of Ravel, Jean Ahn (Korea/US)
Beside the Lake at Taize, Gila Carcas (UK)
Anregung, Christine McCombe (AUS)
Surface II, Nicole Murphy (AUS)
Snowy Landscape, Joyce Wai-Chung Tang (HK)
Aphrodite Urania / Aphrodite Pandemos, Emma Wilde (UK)
Cockatoos, Hilary Kleinig (AUS)