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A Folly for Michael Kieran Harvey

September 2007. Michael Kieran Harvey will give the first performance of Andrew Ford's Folly for solo piano in Hobart on 11 October 2007.

To compose some new variations on the 16th-century melody, 'La Folia', could certainly seem like folly, given that the world already has more than 300 sets of variations on that tune. But Ford's piece is also especially virtuosic (when Michael Kieran Harvey commissions a piece he likes to tell the composer, 'Make it really hard') so that anyone embarking upon learning this particular set of variations would need to be slightly crazy in the first place.

Ford's other, recent piano pieces include Thin Air, for the 2008 Sydney International Piano Competition, and Broadway Boogie Woogie (score available for free download, see below). Michael Kieran Harvey has recently recorded Broadway Boogie Woogie for release on the Move label.

The first bars of Folly (2007):

Bagpipe Music (for Louis MacNeice)

September 2007. Bagpipe Music for harp and recorder, commissioned by harpist Marshall McGuire, was given its first performance in the Utzon Room concert series at the Sydney Opera House.

McGuire is the curator of this series, but he also performed in the world premiere of Bagpipe Music on 23 September. The piece was written for McGuire and recorder virtuoso, Genevieve Lacey – specifically for her tenor and alto ganassi recorders – and the title alludes not only to the presence of the drones, Scotch snaps and jig-like rhythmic patterns that dominate the piece, but also to the poem of the same name by Louis MacNeice. The centenary of MacNeice's birth falls in 2007, and Ford's Bagpipe Music is dedicated to the poet's memory.

Sydney Symphony to premiere Headlong

June 2007. On Wednesday 1st August, Jeffrey Tate will conduct the Sydney Symphony in the world premiere of Andrew Ford's Headlong. Commissioned by the SSO for its 75th anniversary season, the seven-minute piece consists of a single melodic line which ricochets around the different sections of the orchestra, generating an ever-changing harmonic context for itself.

Essentially celebratory in spirit, Headlong contains many solos and showcases each section – though especially the brass. There will be four performances in all in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House (see Performances 2007).

Pictured: extract of the manuscript of Headlong.

Elegy in a Country Graveyard on the Internet

June 2007. On Saturday 28th July, ABC Radio National will broadcast Andrew McLennan's documentary Elegy about the composing of Elegy in a Country Graveyard. McLennan, who as producer worked on the piece with composer Andrew Ford, visited Robertson in the NSW Southern Highlands, where Ford lives and the graveyard is situated.

The documentary will be broadcast in Into the Music (Saturday 28th July at 17.05, Friday 3rd August at 15.05) and for one month following, it will be possible to download Elegy in a Country Graveyard for free from the Into the Music website.

Commissioned with funding from the New South Wales Ministry of the Arts and ABC Radio, Ford’s Elegy evokes the cemetery at Robertson, in the NSW Southern Highlands, with voices, instruments and a backing track of pre-recorded sounds. The live version of the piece was premiered in April 2007 in the inaugural Kangaroo Valley Arts Festival.

For more photos of the Robertson cemetery, see : Robertson cemetery photo gallery

Scenes from Bruegel at the Totally Huge New Music Festival 2007

April 2007. This year’s Totally Huge New Music Festival in Perth features two of Andrew Ford’s works. The Stump-Linshalm duo will play Snatches of Old Lauds (2002) on two bass clarinets, while Brett Dean will conduct members of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in the Australian premiere of Scenes from Bruegel (2006).

The piece for chamber orchestra and pre-recorded sounds was jointly commissioned for WASO and the New Juilliard Ensemble, which gave the world premiere at New York’s Lincoln Center in April 2006. THNMF runs from 20 April – 6 May 2007. (Pictured: Bruegel's painting Hunters in the Snow.)

See also:
NY premiere of Scenes from Bruegel.
Robertson children in Scenes from Bruegel

Elegy in a Country Graveyard
at the inaugural Kangaroo Valley Arts Festival

April 2007. On Sunday 22nd April, the inaugural Kangaroo Valley Arts Festival concludes with the world premiere of Andrew Ford’s Elegy in a Country Graveyard. Commissioned with funding from the New South Wales Ministry of the Arts and ABC Radio, Ford’s Elegy evokes the cemetery at Robertson, in the NSW Southern Highlands, with voices, instruments and a backing track of pre-ecorded sounds.
The backing track was made at the ABC studios in Sydney and is a collage of weather, birdsong and voices (senior Robertson residents reminiscing about the cemetery and some of those who are buried there) all overlayed above a long, slow-moving sequence of chords played on vibraphone, harmonium, piano and harp. The performance at Kangaroo Valley Hall is by the Courthouse Choir and the Southern Highlands Concert Band, conducted by the composer.

See also: Robertson cemetery photo gallery

A musical birthday party in a cave

December 2006. In March 2007, Andrew Ford will celebrate his 50th birthday in a cave in central New South Wales.

As part of the 2007 Kowmung Festival, a concert of Ford’s music is scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday 18th March (the birthday itself) in Abercrombie Caves, near Bathurst.

The highlights include Jane Edwards singing Ford’s prize-winning folksong cycle Tales of the Supernatural, Eva Gruesser, concert master of the American Composers Orchestra, in the Australian premiere of War and Peace, for violin and percussion, and bass clarinettist Catherine McCorkill playing Snatches of Old Lauds over a drone from deep within the cave. Ford himself will introduce the pieces.

Full program details will be available soon from the Kowmung Festival website and booking enquiries can be made by emailing: bookings [at] kowmung.com.au

Photo © Stephen Fearnley.

Four first performances announced for 2007

November 2006. Performances of Andrew Ford’s music in 2007 (now available from the news page) include several world premieres. In April, Arts in the Valley, the new festival at Kangaroo Valley in New South Wales, features two premieres in two days. Yvonne Kenny will sing Chimney-sweepers, Ford’s setting of Shakespeare’s words from Cymbeline, ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, and the composer himself will conduct the first performance of Elegy in a Country Graveyard with the members of local choirs and the Southern Highlands Concert Band.

The graveyard in question is at Robertson, in the NSW Southern Highlands, where Ford lives. (See also the Robertson Cemetery photo gallery) Composed with the assistance of the NSW Ministry for the Arts and ABC Radio, Elegy draws on environmental sounds and the speaking voices of local Robertson residents. Also in April, at Perth’s Totally Huge New Music Festival, Brett Dean will conduct the Australian premiere of Scenes from Bruegel with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. One of the works composed during Ford’s two-year Australia Council Fellowship, it was first performed by the New Juilliard Ensemble at New York’s Lincoln Center in April 2006.

In May, clarinettist Catherine McCorkill and other members of the Australia Ensemble will premiere Ford’s clarinet quintet, Oma kodu, while in August the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under Jeffrey Tate will give the first four performances of the Ford’s new orchestral work, Headlong.

Pictured: The Robertson Cemetery (click for a larger image).

In Defence of Classical Music reprinted

October 2006. Andrew Ford’s latest book, In Defence of Classical Music, has been reprinted by ABC Books after its first print run sold out. It is available from all good bookshops in Australia, and online from ABC Shops.

In the book, Ford asks how the symphonies of Beethoven and string quartets of Brahms can possibly be relevant to a post-9/11 world. He argues that it is precisely because we live in discordant times that classical music is more valuable than ever.
‘Classical music is not escapism,’ Ford maintains, ‘it is a form of consolation. A retreat, certainly, but a retreat into reality rather than away from it.’
The distinguished author and musicologist Wilfrid Mellers writes of In Defence of Classical Music, ‘The book is brilliant – especially Part I, which is a necessary prelude to everything I have ever written about music, though neither I nor anyone else has ever done it!’

Other books by Andrew Ford include Composer to composer: conversations about contemporary music and Speaking in Tongues: the songs of Van Morrison, co-written with Martin Buzacott.
See also: the books page.

A Reel, A Fling and A Ghostly Galliard
and other new works

July 2006. Andrew Ford has recently completed his String Quartet No 2 for
the Grainger Quartet. Entitled A Reel, a Fling and a Ghostly Galliard, the 10-minute piece was commissioned for the Graingers by two of their supporters, Pamela Pearce and Wally Patterson.

The new work will be heard during the quartet's inaugural concert tour in November, beginning in Sydney, then travelling to Adelaide, Melbourne and Hong Kong.

Ford is currently working on an orchestral piece, Headlong, for the Sydney Symphony and Jeffrey Tate (August 2007), and has composed the first part of his Symphony for the Australian Youth Orchestra (first performance in 2008). The latter is one of a series of pieces undertaken
during the two-year fellowship awarded by the Music Board of the Australia Council at the end of 2004.

The fellowship has so far produced five new works, including Barleycorn, which was given its first performance in the 2006 Brisbane Festival by the Southern Cross Soloists and folk singers Warren Fahey and Dave de Hugard.

Pictured: Southern Cross Soloists with Dave de Hugard (front left), Andrew Ford (front centre) and Warren Fahey back right). Click image for larger view.

Performances and lectures
in the USA

May 2006. Andrew Ford spent most of April in the United States, attending rehearsals
and performances of his music and lecturing on a variety of topics.

At Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he addressed the entire school on the subject of music as an international language, discussed the blues and early jazz with students in classes devoted to the history of American popular music, and worked with the school orchestra rehearsing his 1999 piece, The Furry Dance.

At the end of his week at the Academy, he presented performances of his solo and chamber music and discussed the works with the audience. After New Hampshire, Ford went to Boston where he gave an illustrated lecture about his work to composition students at the Boston Conservatory, and then at the Juilliard School in New York he led a seminar looking at Australian music since 1945. The American visit ended with the successful premiere at New York's Lincoln Center of Scenes from Bruegel, composed for and performed by the New Juilliard Ensemble under conductor Joel Sachs.

Click here to hear Andrew Ford discuss his piece with John Schaefer of WNYC.

New York premiere for
Scenes from Bruegel

March 2006. Andrew Ford's Scenes from Bruegel will receive its first performance by the New Juilliard Ensemble under its conductor Joel Sachs on April 24. Composed during Ford's two-year fellowship from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts (the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body), Scenes from Bruegel is in three movements, each taking as its
starting point one of the most famous paintings by the 16th-century Flemish artist, Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Throughout the work, the orchestral music is supplemented and often inspired by sounds recorded in and around the New South Wales Southern Highlands, where Ford lives. New Juilliard Ensemble's performance is in Alice Tully Hall at New York's Lincoln Center on Monday April 24 at 8pm.

Please follow this link to read a program note of Scenes from Bruegel. You can also read more about the involvement of the Robertson primary school band, pictured here conducted by Andrew Ford.

There is also a concert of Andrew Ford's music by the Music Department of the Phillips Exeter Academy (details) on Friday, 14 April in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Brodsky Quartet plays Ford
in Sydney Festival 2006

January 2006. Making its return to Australia after an absence of eight years, the Brodsky Quartet will perform Andrew Ford's Tales of the Supernatural: folksongs for singer and string quartet in its Sydney Festival concert on January 24 at the City Recital Hall, Angel Place.

The songs, about love and ghosts, are from Finland, Scotland, Sweden, England and the Appalachian Mountains. Soprano Jane Edwards, who sang in the world premiere at the 2004 Adelaide Festival, will again be the singer. Tales of the Supernatural was commissioned by the Ian Potter Foundation and in 2005 won the APRA Award for Best Vocal Piece.

Music and Fashion on ABC Classic FM

January 2006. Music and Fashion is a six-part series commissioned by ABC radio, written and presented by Andrew Ford. The programs can be heard on ABC Classic FM at 2 pm each Sunday from New Year's Day. You can also listen online and read transcripts.

Music and Fashion asks why certain types of music have been fashionable at certain moments in history, and what this might tell us about the way in which human beings hear, appreciate and use music.

Robertson children
in Scenes from Bruegel

December 2005. Andrew Ford's
piece for the New Juilliard Ensemble,
Scenes from Bruegel, includes pre-recorded sounds from his home in Robertson, New South Wales.

Some of these are environmental
sounds (birdsong, for instance), but in the final movement, inspired by Bruegel's famous painting, 'The Peasant's Wedding Dance', the New York players will be joined by the pre-recorded sound of the primary school band at Robertson Public School.

Scenes from Bruegel is being composed
under the terms of a two-year Fellowship from the Music Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Government's arts funding and advisory body.

The New Juilliard Ensemble, under its conductor Joel Sachs, will give the first performance of Scenes from Bruegel at Alice Tully Hall in New York's Lincoln Center on 24 April 2006.

Picture:Recording session of Scenes from Bruegel with the Robertson Public School band.
(Click to enlarge.)

An die Musik premiere in Adelaide

December 2005. On Saturday 10 December, at St Peter's Cathedral, Adelaide, the Adelaide
Chamber Singers will give the world premiere of Andrew Ford's An die Musik, especially composed for the choir's 20th anniversary in 2005. The concert will be broadcast live on ABC Classic FM and and streamed on the internet at 20.30 Eastern Summer Time (Australia) or 09.30 GMT.

Click here to find out more about the piece and to read the texts by David Malouf, Thomas Shapcott and Gwen Harwood, as well as folk poetry from Malaysia, Finland and the Pueblo Indians of America. You can also download the texts as a pdf file (20 KB).

In Defence of Classical Music
in bookshops 16 September

September 2005. In his new book, In Defence of Classical Music, Andrew Ford asks how the symphonies of Beethoven and string quartets of Brahms can possibly be relevant post 9/11. He argues that it is precisely because we live in discordant times that classical music is more valuable than ever.

'Classical music is not escapism,' Ford maintains, 'it is a form of consolation. A retreat, certainly, but a retreat into reality rather than away from it.'

Following the essay which gives the book its title, there are ten shorter essays on individual composers: Dowland, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Brahms, Sibelius, Ravel, John Adams, Kaija Saariaho and Ross Bolleter. Finally, in an attempt to take the reader into the mind of a composer, Ford turns to his own music, with discussions of The Waltz Book, Learning to Howl, and Manhattan Epiphanies.

All details and a sample of the book are available on the books page.

Tales of the Supernatural
wins APRA award

July 2005. Andrew Ford's Tales of the Supernatural has been named Vocal Work of the Year by the Australasian Performing Right Association. The prize was announced on Monday 18 July 2005, at the annual Australian Music Centre/APRA Awards held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Subtitled 'folk songs for singer and string quartet', Tales of the Supernatural was composed in 2002 for the Australian String Quartet with funds provided by the Ian Potter Foundation. The piece weaves songs from various folk traditions (Finnish, Swedish, Scottish, English and American) into a continuous musical fabric lasting some 30 – 35 minutes. The six songs share the twin themes of love and the supernatural – ghosts, demons and other shape shifters.
Tales of the Supernatural received its first performance at the 2004 Adelaide Festival by the ASQ with Jane Edwards. In a message read out at the awards in the composer's absence, Ford thanked them for their 'magical' first performance, and paid tribute to the 'anonymous men and women' who had made up the original folk songs.
This is the fourth national award for Ford's music in just over two years. In March 2003 The Waltz Book won the Jean Bogan Memorial Award, and in 2004 Learning to Howl won both the AMC Award for Best Work by an Australian Composer and the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize.

New radio series scheduled

July 2005. Music and Fashion is a six-part series commissioned by ABC radio, written and presented by Andrew Ford. It asks why certain types of music have been fashionable at certain moments in history, and what this might tell us about the way in which human beings hear, appreciate and use music. Beginning with the most visible of musical fashions – dance crazes – Ford moves on to the role of religion in both inspiring and denying novelty in music, to musical entrepreneurs, the transitory (and often non-musical) nature of fame, the rise and decline of the recording industry and finally to nostalgia – the fashion that keeps on renewing itself.
Episode 1, 'Dirty Dancing' airs on ABC Radio National in the Big Ideas slot at 5.05 pm on Sunday 17 July. More information about the programs is available on the Music and Fashion website .

Sad Jigs and Dance Maze
in Sydney Symphony Orchestra's
Contemporary Music Festival

June 2005. Two pieces by Andrew Ford will be showcased during the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's 2005 Contemporary Music Festival. On Sunday 10 July, Sad Jigs (2005) will receive its world premiere by participants in the SSO's string fellowship program for whom the piece was commissioned. Earlier that same day, festival director Reinbert de Leeuw will conduct members of the SSO in a performance of Ford's 1996 composition, Dance Maze.
Commissioned by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and first performed by the group in January 1997, Dance Maze has since received several performances by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra's New Music Ensemble under Roger Smalley and by the Sydney Alpha Ensemble under Carl Rosman. In 2003 it was given a second US performance by the New Juilliard Ensemble under Joel Sachs.
All performances in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's Contemporary Music Festival will take place at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. The performance of Dance Maze will be preceded by a talk by the composer. Also, at the invitation of the festival, The Music Show will broadcast live from the Conservatorium on Saturday July 9. Further details are available on the SSO website.

'Speaking in Tongues: the songs
of Van Morrison' out now

May 2005. Speaking in Tongues: the songs of Van Morrison (ABC Books 2005) is now out.
Authors Andrew Ford and Martin Buzacott will discuss their book in a session at Sydney Writers' Festival 29 May at 10 am.

Speaking in Tongues is not yet another biography but a book about Van Morrison's music and lyrics. It falls into two main parts. Part One, 'A Sense of Wonder', examines the themes and variations in his songs: images of childhood; musical heroes; transcendence and religion; responses to nature and literature; and Morrison's consistently truculent relationship with the rest of the world's population.

Building on this exploration of the building blocks of Morrison's work, Part Two, 'A Working Man in His Prime', looks at Morrison's studio work album by album, song by song. Finally the book returns the reader to the central concern in any Morrison song – the sound of his voice.
See also: the books page.

Photo: Andrew Ford (left) & Martin Buzacott.

Fellowship produces
new pieces

April 2005. Andrew Ford has completed three new works so far in 2005. These are the piano solo Broadway Boogie-Woogie for Dutch pianist Marcel Worms, the vibraphone and marimba duo Soave sia il vento for West Australian percussionist Callum Moncrieff, and a string quintet entitled Sad Jigs. The quintet—for string quartet plus double bass—was commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for its 2005 string fellows. It will also exist in a version for string orchestra. It is dedicated to the memory of Ford’s former teacher, John Buller, and its title is a cast-off from Debussy. Gigues tristes was Debussy’s first idea for a title for the first movement of his orchestral Images. He ended up calling it simply Gigues.

This concentration on composing has been made possible by the awarding of a two-year fellowship from the Music Board of the Australia Council. Between now and the end of 2006, Ford will compose the large ensemble piece Scenes from Bruegel for the New Juilliard Ensemble and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra New Music Ensemble, a symphony for the Australia Youth Orchestra, and Barleycorn, a second folk-song cycle following on from Tales of the Supernatural, for the Southern Cross soloists. There will also be a solo piano work, Folly, for Michael Kieran Harvey, and Domestic Advice, a new song cycle for soprano Jane Edwards and pianist Ian Munro. Other works in the pipeline include the choral piece An die Musik for the 20 th anniverary of the Adelaide Chamber Singers. The sung texts are poems on the subject of music by David Malouf, Thomas Shapcott and Gwen Harwood. Ford is also planning a piece entitled Elegy in a Country Graveyard which will exist in two forms, one radiophonic, the other a live performance piece for singers and players incorporating taped voices and environmental sounds. This work has been made possible by a grant from the NSW Ministry for the Arts.

Meanwhile before the end of 2005, the writing about music which has occupied Ford over the past two years will bear fruit in the form of two books and a new radio series.

Ananda Sukarlan plays
Fear no more . . . in Sydney and Jakarta

July 2004. In 2002, following the terrorist bomb that killed more than 200 people in a Bali nightclub, the Indonesian pianist Ananda Sukarlan asked 20 composers to write short memorial pieces. The Australian composers who contributed works were Betty Beath, Barry Conyngham, Elena Kats-Chernin, Peter Sculthorpe and Andrew Ford, and these pieces have now been heard in many countries around the world.

In July 2004, Sukarlan, who lives in Spain, will bring the In memoriam concert to Australia for the first time, before taking it on to Indonesia itself. He plays the complete concert at the Eugene Goossens Hall on Sunday July 18, and will also perform the pieces by Kats-Chernin, Sculthorpe and Ford at the Australian Music Centre/APRA awards night in Sydney (and live on ABC Classic FM) on Monday July 12. Andrew Ford's piece, Fear no more . . . takes its title from the funeral oration in Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

2004 Adelaide Festival

February 2004. The Adelaide Festival of the Arts (27 February-14 March) will present the world premiere of Andrew Ford's Tales of the Supernatural. Subtitled "folk songs for voice and string quartet", the half-hour cycle draws on songs from Finland, Scotland, England and the Appalachian Mountains to explore the world of love and ghosts. The piece was commissioned by the Ian Potter Cultural Foundation in 2001 and composed the following year. The Adelaide premiere will be given by the Australian String Quartet together with soprano Jane Edwards. Also in the festival, Gerard Willems will play selections from The Waltz Book (see also The Waltz Book page by Ian Munro) and the Elder Conservatorium Mallet Ensemble will play After the Ball Was Over, Ford's new arrangement of five of the waltzes for a quartet of tuned percussion. See below for details. The performance of After the Ball will be part of Writers' Week, where Ford will be the focus of one of the Meet the Author sessions.

More performances and performers
for The Waltz Book

January 2004. The Waltz Book is steadily being taken up by pianists. Ian Munro commissioned the work and gave the first complete performance in March 2003 (see also The Waltz Book page by Munro). He played it again at the Sydney Opera House Studio on October 20 and at the Melbourne Festival on October 25 (see details below). Simon Docking played the first 24 waltzes at a concert in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in April 2003, and a complete Canadian performance is planned for 2005. In the meantime, both Lisa Moore and Gerard Willems will take up the piece in 2004. Andrew Ford's most recent work for solo piano, Fear no more . . ., dedicated to the victims of the Bali bombing "and all innocent victims of violent men", has received performances in New Zealand, Spain, Norway and Denmark from its commissioner, Ananda Sukarlan. Diana Blom has been playing the piece Australia and Simon Docking gave the Canadian premiere in October 2003. Scores of The Waltz Book and Fear no more . . . are available from the Australian Music Centre.

The Waltz Book
wins the Bogan Prize

April 2003. Andrew Ford's monumental work for solo piano, The Waltz Book, has won the 2002 Jean Bogan Memorial Prize, Australia's national prize for piano compositions. Announced in March 2003, this is the first time the prize has been awarded to a sequence of pieces. The Waltz Book, which coincidentally received its complete world premiere in Hobart, Tasmania, two days before the prize was announced, was commissioned by the pianist and composer, Ian Munro, with financial support from the Australia Council. Comprising 60 minute-long waltzes, ranging in mood 'from frenetic aggression to lilting calm', The Waltz Book takes an hour to play complete. But it was always intended that individual waltzes would have lives of their own, and that pianists might also make selections from The Waltz Book, presenting these groups of pieces as ad hoc suites. Visit the special website for The Waltz Book and listen to extracts.