NOMINATION: Work of the Year - Large Ensemble
Large ensemble music is defined as works for more than 12 players, with or without vocal parts, and with or without electronics. This may include works for orchestra, concert band, wind band, string orchestra.
A work is defined as a single complete musical composition, or expression. This includes music with movements or sub-works (i.e. song cycles), installations, and real-time compositions (improvised music).
If you believe your work to be nominated in the wrong category or the details of your nomination to be incorrect, please contact the AMC via email at awards@australianmusiccentre.com.au before proceeding with the nomination.
This is an impressive piece of composition and audacious in its uptake of Generative AI within the field. Chisholm has a long history of genre bending and skilful control of form, but working with the inherited forms generated by Music AI trained on his own music, and transcribing the formal and gestural restraints into a work for live orchestra, really showed his capacity as a master orchestrator. Having heard the AI audio output and then hearing the work in live performance, I was struck by the accuracy of the transcription, but also the humanising choices the composer made along the way. Its momentum is enhanced by his dialogue with the AI template work, foregrounding certain features nested or hidden in the audio through months of listening and through the grind of transcription. The initial AI work sounds nothing like his signature, but the live orchestral work clearly reads as him. What makes this, for me, the work of the year is not just his creative embracing of new technologies to inform established practices, but that it underlines the ongoing importance of the human composer in this new context, while also demonstrating that in our own ways, we are each of us no different to AI, insofar as we also express and produce aesthetics that are heavily informed by our own training and the contingent ices of our musical knowledge. If this work were shortlisted I would encourage listening to both the AI template and the Auckland Philharmonic performance : the are mirror sites for an intriguing set of aesthetic correspondences and dialogue.