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Commissioned by the Australian Youth Orchestra in 2020, they will perform this work on December 15, 2022, at the Melbourne Town Hall
Andrew Ford OAM is a composer, writer, and broadcaster, whose music often addresses literature or the visual arts. Recently, her pieces have increasingly drawn from her experience of people and places in the New South Wales Southern Highlands, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
One of those tasks is The Meaning of the Treewhich Ford is developing between 2019 and 2020. Focused on Robyn Williams and commissioned by Australian Youth Orchestra (AYO), this 16-minute orchestral work focuses on nature and the changing climate.
The piece will receive its world premiere performance by AYO with the conductor Matthew Corey on December 15, 2022, at 7:30 PM at Melbourne Town Hall. The concert program also includes Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No.1 with the cellist Pei Sian Ng and 1911 version of Stravinsky’s The Firebird: Suite.
Violin Channel had the opportunity to learn more about the work from the composer himself:
VC: What was your idea or inspiration behind the work?
Andrew Ford: The piece came together rather gradually. It’s always been a piece about the natural world and the climate — I haven’t really featured those causes in my music, but more and more, I find myself addressing this issue. For a youth orchestra, it seemed to me, I just had to write music that in some way would concern itself with the future of the players and the existential threat to it. The title comes from an African proverb: ‘The meaning of a tree is in the shade it provides.’
What is your compositional process? How do you take a piece from an idea in your mind to a full score?
My first idea was to do something light and entertaining. I thought I should offer some hope to the players of The Meaning of the Treewhether or not I felt myself hopeful.
So the dry, windy, and thunderous sounds that dominate the first part of the piece will give way, gradually, to something greener as the planet renews itself. In particular, my raucous music was imperceptible through Handel’s LArgo, that orchestral piece based on the aria ‘Ombra mai fu’, King Xerxes’ song in praise of the shade of trees. That was the plan. But I was working on this piece in the summer of 2019-20 when Southeast Australia was burning.
The Australian Bush was meant to burn — that’s how it regenerates — but by December 2019, forests that had never burned before, were burning; rain forests are burning. By New Year’s Eve, my family felt cautiously evacuating our home in the New South Wales Southern Highlands. We returned a few days later, then evacuated again on January 4, and this second time we were absolutely right: the fire was very close to our town. So the direction of the piece changed; comfort turned to anger.
What do you hope the audience will get from listening to the piece?
I hope the audience takes some of that anger out of them. Most of all, I hope the players do. While the orchestra members are in their teens and early twenties, most of the audience is twenty to fifty years older. In other words, players will perform The Meaning of the Tree to an audience – including me – representative of generations who have damaged their future.
To attend AYO’s performance of this piece, click here.
Ford’s music has been broadcast and performed around the world, including with the Australian Chamber Orchestra (ACO), Brodsky Quartet, New Juilliard Ensemble, Het Trio, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, London Sinfonietta, Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, among many others. His works for orchestra or large group have been performed by Jeffrey Tate, Marko Letonja, Benjamin Northey, and recent Ivors Composer Award winner, Brett Dean.
A graduate of University of Lancaster, Ford studied composition with Edward Cowiem and John Buller, and received mentorship from Sir Michael Tippett. Ford later taught at University of Wollongong, where he also completed his doctoral studies, and from 1992 to 1994, was composer-in-residence at the ACO. His many awards include Sidney Myer Performing Arts Awards and the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2016 Queen’s Birthday Honours.
Founded in 1948, AYO is a non-profit training organization for young pre-professional musicians, providing tailored programs each year for aspiring musicians, composers, arts administrators and music journalists aged between 12 and 30 .
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