Twenty Years of ELISION

Daryl BUCKLEY
Artistic Director, ELISION Ensemble

The distance covered. A simple phrase, but with respect to ELISION there are so many starting points from which this narrative can unfold. At the beginning, I remember a group of passionate music students trained at the Victorian College of the Arts, the assistances of Sandringham and Footscray Community Art Centres, and the support of a large number of Melbourne composers, friends and family. And amongst a Melbourne music environment teeming with new music ensembles, there was at times a fierce aesthetic opposition from some within the new music community---simple anxieties and unarticulated fears of the European art world, even of the wider Australian situation itself.

What is clear twenty years on is that all of the support, controversy and energies are rolled into one transformative story. ELISION operates as a national ensemble with a core of twenty players, whose questing musicianship and dedication have created enormous achievement. Since the late eighties, ELISION's focus has been resolutely international and this has brought rewards and recognition for Australian new music. This internationalism is indicated by: nineteen tours to fourteen different countries; over thirty-four international composer commissions; the presence of over one hundred and twenty composers, visual artists, conductors and musicians as international participants within the group's actual Australian program; the uptake of ELISION repertoire, composers and collaborative practices by other ensembles; partnerships with Ensemble Modern and Cikada Ensemble; and a presence in the programs of some of world's most distinguished international arts festivals and venues---Wien Modern, the Philharmonie Berlin, Hebbel Theater, Saitama Arts Centre Japan, Agora Festival Paris, Milano Musica, Zürich TheatreSpektakel, Pro Musica Nova, BBC3, and the Huddersfield and Liverpool Festivals.

ELISION has provided a platform, encouragement and support that has enabled a new generation of brilliant Australian musicians such as conductor Simon HEWETT, guitarist Geoffrey MORRIS, and clarinettists Carl ROSMAN and Richard HAYNES, amongst many others, to emerge with careers of significance. ELISION has been a dynamic factor in the artistic expressions of composers Liza LIM, Richard BARRETT, Timothy O'DWYER, Chris DENCH, and John RODGERS, and in the internationalisation and advocacy of the work of other Australian composers. The ensemble has brought to life and recorded the music of European composers such as Barrett, Brian FERNEYHOUGH, Aldo CLEMENTI, and Franco DONATONI with great stylistic authority and in so doing has created a tradition and examples of international exchange which other Australian ensembles and musicians have followed.

On June 10 and 11 2006, in concerts in Brisbane and Sydney ELISION celebrates this internationalism with premieres of Lim's Mother Tongue, Dench's Agni-Prometheus-Lucifer, O'Dwyer's Gravity and the Amor of Rodgers for intertwined flute and oboe.

Guest Artists will include conductor Jean DEROYER (France), soprano Piia KOMSI (Finland), violinist Graeme JENNINGS (USA), pianist Marilyn NONKEN (USA), saxophonist John BUTCHER (UK), oboist Peter VEALE, clarinetist Carl ROSMAN (Germany), and poet Patricia SYKES (Australia).

In 2006 ELISION continues to be an explorer committed to new modes of practice and cross art-form works that defy easy categorisation. In the coming years, increasing emphasis will be placed upon creative development and research underpinning heavily internationalised projects of scale. Concert performance is still important. In this time, the hardest demand to make upon an audience is that of `active listening' without distraction and ELISION has never shied away from being demanding.

As critics have noted, "You don't go to a concert by the ELISION ensemble for relaxation. You go to be stimulated, challenged and knocked about by sound", or "ELISION constructs itself not so much as a concert-performing ensemble but as a vehicle for the creation of unique and thought-provoking artistic statements. ELISION projects are ones with which one mentally carries on an argument long after the event".

As ELISION's artistic director in this twenty-first year of activity, I see our role as supporting the rarefied and the fragile, in creating a public space for work which is not of the obvious, but rather that which is incredibly interesting and compelling in ambition and imagination.

A version of this article first appeared in the Australian Music Centre's Sounds Australian magazine, and is reprinted with permission.