NOMINATION: Excellence in Experimental Practice
For works, people or events that interrogate, extend, or challenge standard artistic practice within the Australian repertoire
If you believe you are 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.
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Nominee
Jasmin Wing Yin Leung, Sally Ann McIntyre, Mindy Meng Wang, Kaylie Melville and Speak Percussion
Nominated Project/Activity
The Ninth Tone
Nominator Statement
"The Ninth Tone," is an hour long original experimental music work composed by Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung, performed alongside the diverse and complimentary practices of Mindy Meng Wang, Sally Ann McIntyre and Kaylie Melville, and produced by experimental music trailblazers Speak Percussion.
Conceived within the historically resonant context of the oldest continuous Chinese settlement outside of Asia (Melbourne's Chinatown), the work offers a nuanced reimagining of Chinese Australian musical legacy through the lens of experimental art music. Leung's composition directly challenges reductive "east meets west" narratives, acknowledging the long and complex history of Chinese musical presence in Australia. Led by Leung, the artists together unveil different frames of possibilities to what Chinese Australian music was, is and can be, moving beyond essentialist representations of cultural identity, each artist bringing a highly sensitive, personal frame of understanding 'cultural forgetting'.
This work showcases the highest level of experimentation across multiple layers of practice. In the hands of these unique practitioners, strong artistic ideas are realised at both their most experimental extreme and elemental truths. Complex harmonic structures are built out of extended rational intonations of mathematical 'truths', whilst the layered invisible architecture of McIntyres multichannel electromagnetic waves bring forward her lifetime of experimental radio practice, to Melville's virtuosic struck percussion realising the possibilities of acoustic archeology based off historical texts of the goldfields, and precision microtuning of the guzheng to resonate with the exact frequencies of echoes of old Cantonese Opera tents. This highly complex work shows true experimentation at all levels. Led by the youngest artist in the group, this quartet built a speculative portal that revealed a layered, fragmented, hauntological understanding of of a distinctly Chinese Australian memory.
Nominee
Jasmin Wing Yin Leung, Sally Ann McIntyre, Mindy Meng Wang, Kaylie Melville and Speak Percussion
Nominated Project/Activity
The Ninth Tone
Conceived within the historically resonant context of the oldest continuous Chinese settlement outside of Asia (Melbourne's Chinatown), the work offers a nuanced reimagining of Chinese Australian musical legacy through the lens of experimental art music. Leung's composition directly challenges reductive "east meets west" narratives, acknowledging the long and complex history of Chinese musical presence in Australia. Led by Leung, the artists together unveil different frames of possibilities to what Chinese Australian music was, is and can be, moving beyond essentialist representations of cultural identity, each artist bringing a highly sensitive, personal frame of understanding 'cultural forgetting'.
This work showcases the highest level of experimentation across multiple layers of practice. In the hands of these unique practitioners, strong artistic ideas are realised at both their most experimental extreme and elemental truths. Complex harmonic structures are built out of extended rational intonations of mathematical 'truths', whilst the layered invisible architecture of McIntyres multichannel electromagnetic waves bring forward her lifetime of experimental radio practice, to Melville's virtuosic struck percussion realising the possibilities of acoustic archeology based off historical texts of the goldfields, and precision microtuning of the guzheng to resonate with the exact frequencies of echoes of old Cantonese Opera tents. This highly complex work shows true experimentation at all levels. Led by the youngest artist in the group, this quartet built a speculative portal that revealed a layered, fragmented, hauntological understanding of of a distinctly Chinese Australian memory.