MODART

Modart

MODART is a professional development project that provides opportunities for emerging composers to develop works for vocal ensemble, and which then receive public performance by The Song Company.

Biography: Brad Taylor-Newling

A composer, pianist and teacher, Brad Taylor-Newling was born in Sydney in 1975; the start of his musical life, in hand with his first piece, followed six years later. With only history and intuition to guide his composing until his late-teens, private studies with Kirsty Beilharz soon led to his enrolment in the Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Sydney, where he graduated with first-class honours in 2002. During this time, he worked with teachers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards, Ian Shanahan and Anne Boyd, and received several awards including the Frank Albert Prize and the Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize for composition.

A diverse musical background has enabled Brad to accept commissions from a wide range of sources. His pieces, which have featured in a number of concerts, symposia and festivals across Australia, range from modest educational and publishing projects to large-scale works for organisations such as the Bell Shakespeare Company and the Sydney International Arts Festival. At present, Brad is embarking on a new commission from the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra as part of the Cybec 21st Century Australian Composer’s Program.

Program Notes: Night Prayer

Night Prayer draws its text from the Lingua Ingota of Hildegard von Bingen, the remnants of a secret language the abbess believed was divine in provenance, and by turns the true voice of God himself. Often spoken of in the same breath as her music, and occasionally used in it, the 900 words left to us name celestial beings, liturgical terms, plants, animals and places, but are not bound by any discernible grammar. Instead, the song itself becomes the framework for this mysterious language, the site of its re-imagining, and of its rebirth.

Borrowing its symbolism from a type of ritual prayer common to many faiths, Night Prayer combines words to create metaphors of light and its absence, of hope overcoming fear, and of our descent into darkness and deliverance from it. In another sense, it forms a text that reflects the inarticulacy of human longing by using a language whose sounds and meanings are always just beyond us. Serving both ideas is a single melodic line, increasingly shadowed and concealed by its own image – three voices intertwined in a meditation on what it is to be human.