Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Image: Fiona Hill's 'Circumstance'. Performed by Ensemble Contrechamps and ASQ with conductor Eugene Ughetti. Visuals by Sue Healey.  
© Photo by Peter Hislop

This year in my role as Composer in Residence at the Canberra International Music Festival I had the pleasure of composing three new works. Whilst they all required completely different approaches to composition, I found that through centring collaboration at the heart of each compositional process I was able to more deeply explore what really matters when creating new work. As you'll discern if you read to the end of this article (spoiler alert!) the answer is deep connection, authenticity, and exploration through collaboration.

Two of the works, UnderOnBelow and Mappa, featured in MOSSO: Music in Motion (a festival takeover of the National Film and Sound Archive), while the third, If Only We Could Listen, premiered in the festival finale at the Snow Concert Hall, scored for two pianos and two percussionists.

UnderOnBelow began in close collaboration with saxophonist Joshua Hyde, working together to uncover what is possible on the instrument, then taking those discoveries further to explore our connection with the living, breathing earth. Joshua's openness and virtuosity helped to shape the work, allowing me to push the instrument in ways I never had before. Whilst the music was of course central, we both wanted the piece to be deeply immersive experience, which is where the visual element comes in. Working with the extraordinary lighting and visual designer Fausto Brusamolino brought an added layer to the work. Following ideas in David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous, where Abram talks about how we "may suddenly feel ourselves in relation with another expressive power" when "these two senses [sight and sound] converge", I wanted the visuals and music to be an integral part of the whole performance experience, drawing sight and sound together into something greater than the sum of its parts, helping us to experience (hopefully!) a greater presence than the solely human world. For this reason the visuals are often abstract, yet always enmeshed with the work's underlying concept. A focus on the natural world and what we see every day but brought into a hyperfocus that draws our attention to the magic before us when we truly take the time to look. Just as deep listening brings us to that place when we truly stop to listen. UnderOnBelow premiered as part of a portrait concert in the Arc cinema, a programme that also featured a live performance of Circumstance, the multi-award winning contemporary dance film by director Sue Healey, with members of Ensemble Contrechamps and the Australian String Quartet.


Image: 'UnderOnBelow' - Artists: Joshua Hyde (saxophone), Frausto Brusamolino (visuals). Photo by Peter Hislop.

Mappa was the most open and collaboratively derived work of the three (also making it the scariest!) Mappa comes from one of earliest known words for a map, with the first maps being thought to be drawn on cloth, mappa being the word for napkin or cloth in Latin. The title therefore brings together the underlying themes at the heart of the work, the making of fabric and acts of wayfaring. Having less strict compositional control over each element of the music meant placing huge trust in the musicians I was working with. Fortunately, artistic director Eugene Ughetti and MusicACT director Sia Ahmad helped me to curate an incredible line up of performers, bringing the wonderful local musicians Umki and Tom Fell together with Geneva-based Ensemble Contrechamps. Devised with contemporary dancer Miranda Wheen, the work explores themes of women's work, drawn specifically from the historical research of Elizabeth Wayland Barber in Women's Work the first 20 000 years. Supported by a Bundanon residency in early 2026, Miranda and I developed a loom-like structure that she could dance within, until she became so entangled in it that it came to resemble more of a spider's web that she was trapped in, an unexpectedly emotional experience. Presented in the gallery space at the National Film and Sound Archive, the work invited the audience to take their time, to wander and explore as the performance was literally built around and among them. A sonic 'map' formed the basis of the score, offering the performers general instructions within an overarching structure. Within that structure they were free to improvise and interact, encouraged towards deep listening and genuine communication with one another and with the audience. At its centre was a traditional weaving song from Northern England, a way of bringing my own matrilineal heritage and connection to fabric making and textile art into the piece.


Images:'Mappa' - (L) Artists: Pierre Stéphane-Mergé (Ensemble Contrechamps, Umiki (Lucky Wheeler); (R) Artist: Miranda Wheen. Photos by Dalice Trost.

If Only We Could Listen is perhaps the most traditionally composed of the three works, drawing on the long history of repertoire for two pianos and two percussionists that reaches back to Bartók. The same themes of time, presence, listening and deep connection run through it, albeit explored in different ways. The two pianists play highly rigid material transcribed from sheet-metal factory field recordings, anchored to the huge industrial machine they are playing (the piano). In contrast, the percussionists move around the stage at key moments, bringing a fluidity and freedom that gradually influences the pianists. Eventually the machine breaks down, and the pianists too give themselves over to a tender, embodied exploration of their instruments. The performers are overwhelmed once more by a frenzied macabre waltz built from motifs of the sheet-metal factory, a reflection on the futility and tragedy of progress at all costs. Ultimately the musicians are asked to connect deeply with one another, finding new ways to engage with their instruments that physically bring them together, while ghostly fragments of the machinery sound in the background through transducers attached to a tam-tam and timpani. Whilst there is a certain amount of programmaticism to the work, the deeper intention is to explore the ways we might connect and engage as performers in a traditional concert setting, allowing the embodiment of performance to help us ask difficult questions as a society. What would be possible if we could all truly listen? Not just to ourselves, but to the more-than-human world that we share.


Image: 'If Only We Could Listen' premiere Snow Concert Hall. Artists: Dante Costa (page turner), Fiona Hill (composer), Kaylie Melville (percussion), Kristian Chong (piano), Timothy Young (piano), Eugene Ughetti (percussion).

As a composer, I am incredibly grateful to have three such varied platforms for my work within a single festival. Huge thanks to Artistic Director Eugene Ughetti and the entire Canberra International Music Festival team for their wonderful commitment and vision! A portfolio career often means that one month I am writing for contemporary dance, the next for film, the next for the concert hall. What this residency offered was the chance to let those aspects overlap. Across all three works I found myself returning to the same threads: deep listening and presence, authentic collaboration, and an exploration of our connection and responsibility to the living earth. Bringing film, dance, improvisation and notated concert music into a single conversation is, for me, where the real discovery lies. Perhaps it's also where the longevity of contemporary art music can be found. As I heard the wonderful percussionist Pirashanna Thevarajah say at a performance talk recently, "it's all just music", a reminder for us to let the boundaries that classify and divide music blur, allowing for deeper connection between artists, audiences and the living world that we are all a part of.

The scores for all three works are available to purchase through the Australian Music Centre. You can explore more about these projects and my wider practice at fionahill.net