Room Music with Regional Resonance
June 2013
For a city that prides itself as the national cultural capital, Melbourne hosts surprisingly few headquarters of the nation’s leading music organisations.
Chamber Music Australia however is one of the most conspicuous and important of our local residents. Its work in promoting this most cultured of classical music genres reaches a zenith every four years with the Melbourne International Chamber Music Competition. It also runs an Asia-Pacific Chamber Music Competition that occurs in the middle of this cycle. Next month, the 2013 Asia-Pacific Competition will take place from July 8 – 14 at the Melbourne Recital Centre and the Iwaki Auditorium.
Originally entitled the Australian Chamber Music Competition, this second event was founded in 1997 with the aim to provide musicians from the region both the opportunity and encouragement to prepare for the global competition two years later. In this respect it proved successful from the very outset. One of the three entries in that inaugural year was a trio led by Melbourne cellist Josephine Vains that successfully made the grade in 1999. The same pathway was taken a few years later by the Tin Alley Quartet, which famously went on to win the 9th Banff International String Quartet Competition in 2007.
The broadening of its focus to the Asia-Pacific region came about as a result of successful lobbying of Chamber Music Australia by educational institutions and teachers in New Zealand. It also reflected the organisation’s recognition, several years in advance of the current Federal Government’s ‘Asian Century’ White Paper, that Australia’s cultural (as well as political and economic) interests were increasingly moving away from an historic European and American focus towards our near neighbours. The competition has thus grown to become a kind of Commonwealth Games to Chamber Music Australia’s musical Olympiad.
This expansion into Asia could seem ironic given that, of all musical genres, chamber music is particularly associated with ‘old Europe’. In fact, the last thirty years have witnessed massive institutional investment in cities such as Singapore, Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul to enable them to produce local musicians capable of performing chamber music at the highest level. It is ironic indeed, then, that this same period in Australia has seen a disinvestment in our own tertiary-level music institutions. In this sphere of cultural diplomacy at least Australia will soon be massively outgunned by its regional competitors.
While governments may consider that there is very little political capital to be had in the funding of high-quality classical music education in Australia, there is, however, considerable ‘grass roots’ support for chamber music in the wider community. One particularly positive initiative from this year’s competition is the introduction of a People’s Chamber Music event that draws attention to the fact that for many people chamber music is a participatory, as well as spectator, sport.
The idea arose out of a comment the ABC Classic FM presenter Emma Ayres made in 2011 during the lead-up to that year’s International Chamber Music Comp lamenting the fact that amateur quartets like her own lacked an opportunity to perform in the Melbourne Recital Centre, this city’s purpose-built chamber music venue. Now they do, and the result is a free concert on Saturday July 13 at 2.30.
The 2013 Asia-Pacific Chamber Music Competition will take place from July 8 – 14 in Melbourne.
chambermusicaustralia.com.au
melbournerecital.com.au
Images:
1. Orava Quartet Australia
2. ARC Trio, Japan
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