A radical experiment in limitless music, words and truth

Brisbane Music Festival and its artistic director Alex Raineri give the world premiere of my first piano sonata on Sunday 10 December 2023. I’m so grateful to Alex for commissioning it and Creative Australia for supporting the commission and performance. Tickets and concert information are here.

Update, 23 March 2024: the following is a video of the world premiere, in which Jonathan Henderson (flute) and Nicole Greentree (viola) join Alex and give this simply superlative performance.

This Piano Sonata is the climax and finale of a multi-movement, multi-forces work called Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth. This is the title I’ve given to everything I wrote while the Covid-19 pandemic lasted. It is a procession of music for solo piano, choir, symphony orchestra, saxophone quartet and harp and back to solo piano. The forces and their sections never touch each other, but are quarantined, isolated, yet strung by a tension – a desire – to be together. 

As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, whatever else it has shown, Covid has also shown humanity at its best. We can make proven vaccines in less than a year. It thrills me, and sobers me too because now I know that the last viral crisis that I lived and worked through, the AIDS epidemic, could have been solved this way but wasn’t – 13 vaccines in the first year alone, versus no vaccine at all after 40 years. I was a virologist before I became a musician. I was employed in a virology laboratory performing genomic sequencing during that previous pandemic. I daresay my music must be amongst the very few Covid-era works written by a practicing composer who was also a practicing virologist. 

Most of the sections of Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth were written in those bleak days, pre-vaccines. And what I wrote was about memory. Like Ray Bradbury’s rebels memorizing books that were being burned, Gravity and Levity is a commitment to remember music. Not just original music I wrote, but whatever came my way as I was writing it – hymns, bugle tunes, hay-making songs, sonatas. And also original music I accidentally wrote, on account of misremembering. Isn’t that how originality works? You try to reproduce something, but you make mistakes, the reproduction is imperfect, and if it’s imperfect enough, it’s original. Isn’t that how viruses work: it reproduces but the reproductions have imperfections, but if the imperfections are viable, you get a new strain. 

From my experience of the AIDS pandemic I know that a pandemic ends at different times for everyone. To a degree, it is a choice because, at some point after the crisis’ peak, either you decide to let your experience of the pandemic persist, or you decide you are finished with it. At the end of 2021, I decided to write this sonata to mark the break, to hearten from dishearten. 

One of the works this sonata remembers is the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives, who thankfully recovered after infection during the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, the last time the whole world stopped for a virus. 

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