It’s been a very busy few months – lots of it having little to do with music, what with relocating my home and studio to Newtown, a veritable tree-change after the very authentic grit & grime of Surry Hills where I’ve lived & worked for the past 11 years. So a very big move, even if it’s only a few kilometers as the crow flies. For all the stress of the transition I’m very happy in my new digs, as are my plants – we now have a back garden area with access to sunlight all day, natural rainfall, and a hose. How I got around to working on the new MA tracks or uploading so much audio to the Listen section of this site staggers me (there’s also a sneak preview in the Chopin Project 2010 section).

In amongst all of this the My Mutation competition came to it’s delightful conclusion on Sunday 26th September with the announcement of the winner Sarah McCreanor from Brisbane, who came down to dance on the Opera House Forecourt with a very talented troupe of volunteers all choreographed by Kate Champion. Kate’s concept of a sudden, surprise start to the competition’s grand finale dance that would feel like a flash-mob performance was really terrific – the crowd, myself included, was completely taken in and when the dancing started it was exhilarating. There was a Footloose dance class happening on the stage, getting the audience warmed up for a screening of the film later in the evening, and it was interrupted by these killjoy security guards who started moving people off the stage, getting boos from the crowd. But then….

You can now see the whole sequence on YouTube – there’s a video diary thing by Sarah at the start but the dancing gets going at around the 6 minute mark (though it’s worth watching earlier for the dance class footage – everyone was really good!).

And in other news, it looks like we have a date for the premiere of the Chopin Project Piano Suite (still untitled, unfortunately): December 3, 2010 at 1.30pm, just scraping into this momentous 200th anniversary year. It’s going to be presented by the Australian Institute of Music where I teach, and it will be put on free for HSC students from around the city, followed by a mini-lecture from me about how the works were written and how they might go about using those techniques in their HSC works. Zubin is back in London, madly learning them as I type, and in truth I’m rather looking forward to hearing him play them. I’ve gotten so used to the MIDI version I imagine it will be quite disorienting when I first hear them, but I’m hoping hoping it will be a pleasant kind of disorientation.

For those interested in attending, let me know – there’ll be some room for GP so get in touch if you’d like to come.