music Archives - squawk studios

Front Foot | Back Beat

20 Sep 2023

Front Foot | Back Beat is a public dance collaboration that brought together a diverse range of people to create a new dance work. The project is the third in a trilogy of dance initiatives, under the guidance of dancer and community artist Samara Cunningham, combining trained and untrained dancers, across a range of ages and abilities.

Dance Hall

26 Mar 2023

Dance Hall is a dance lab experiment, drawing together five professionally trained dancers from South Gippsland in Victoria, each with different backgrounds and histories, to create a new work—a dance sketch—all in the space of six weeks.

Action Station

22 May 2022

Action Station is the second in a series of community dance projects, which matched a group of professional artists with a diverse range of community members, of all ages and skill levels, to collectively create an original and distinctive dance work.

Fill The Void

22 Aug 2021

On a cool August night 2021, in the midst of rolling COVID-19 lockdowns, a magical thing happened. A small group of performers managed to stage a performance in a small, rural hall. Against a backdrop of pandemic fear and isolation, this was a strange and wonderful thing to occur.

An end to discord

31 Oct 2017

Music is music, right? But through the middle of the 20th Century, our evolving appetite for innovation took us on some pretty weird detours, especially in the world of classical music. So, in the midst of all this, what happened to the familiar tradition of tonal composition?

Requiems for the 21st Century

20 May 2015

How do requiems help atheists and heathens to grieve in the 21st Century? Through the 20th Century the form became increasingly abstracted and in a way secularised, to a point where today we have works that are not merely ecumenical—they’re universally accessible.

Tricky business, this thing called opera

12 Oct 2014

In 1954 Aaron Copland, one of the darlings of 20th Century American music, created an opera that was damned with faint praise. Everything else Copland touched seemed to turn to gold. So was it a bad opera, or was it just bad timing?

Aaron Copland and The Tender Land

10 Oct 2014

The 1950s turned out to be a tricky time for Aaron Copland, the master of Americana, to create his first major opera. In a period of mass-neuroses typified by Senator McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts, Copland found himself less sure of his standing as a darling of the music world.

A place called Morley

29 Apr 2014

It’s one of the most important institutions for English music in the 20th Century—a place that Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Michael Tippett poured their heart and soul into. The buildings witnessed the creation of some of the best known works of the last century. But it’s almost certain you’ll not know of it, and it’s barely mentioned in the conventional histories of the period.

Sonic Structures

22 Sep 2013

Our world is a complex organism, more interrelated than the silos in which we typically place it. One area of research to recognise this is the new discipline of participatory architecture, which explores among other things the relationship between music and buildings. Michael Shirrefs explores the search for harmony in the built environment.

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