Sisters in Sync: 3-2-1 with Sally Whitwell

3 Questions - 2 Insights - 1 unique photo with remarkable women musicians

We are thrilled to share an incredibly insightful interview with Sally Whitwell, a distinguished Australian pianist, composer, conductor, and educator living and working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. Known for her versatility and innovative contributions to classical and contemporary music, Whitwell's achievements include multiple ARIA awards, five solo albums on ABC Classic, and a prolific output of compositions spanning solo piano, choral works, and chamber music. She has created numerous choral works and has worked with renowned ensembles such as the Gondwana Choirs, Adelaide Chamber Singers, and Sydney Children's Choir. Her collaborations extend to visual artists and theatre directors, highlighting her commitment to interdisciplinary creativity.

One of Whitwell’s notable recent projects is Margaret and the Grey Mare, a unique opera and immersive video installation co-created with artist Katy B Plummer. This innovative work features a chatbot coded to act as a channel to an ancient Celtic land spirit. Anchoring the project is a sprawling hour-long video opera, with a score composed and performed by Whitwell. The opera, filmed at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, was produced in collaboration with award-winning filmmaker and video artist Kuba Dorabialski. The libretto was generated using a specially coded machine learning tool designed to simulate conversation with The Grey Mare, treating AI as a mystical link to the collective unconscious.

In this interview, Whitwell explores her experiences of collaboration, the challenges and rewards of creating interdisciplinary art, and her perspectives on the future of classical music.

Can you share an experience where collaborating with other women significantly influenced your work?

Finding the right collaborators is absolutely crucial. Done wrong, it can compromise your voice to a point that it becomes not representative of your work. Done right, their perspective can help you to see yourself more clearly and bring you into worlds where your message will be received more openly. Two cases in point, Katy B Plummer and Rosa Campagnaro, with whom I’ve started writing opera. I never previously thought of writing opera, because that part of the classical sector is so closed. Instead of trying to knock on that door that no one will answer, I made these operas with my fabulous collaborators in their worlds instead of mine. It’s changed my life!

With artist Katy B Plummer, I co-created Margaret and the Grey Mare, a multi-channel video installation fever dream about an opera. Katy commissioned a bespoke artificial intelligence from coder Flora Suen who trained it to speak as a kind of oracle, and we used it to co-write the libretto. It is set during the 17th century European witch trials where Margaret, an imagined ancestor, is visited each night by a mysterious horse ghost The Grey Mare, and each day by a Witch Finder. Accused by the latter of being a witch, Margaret eventually capitulates and gives up the Grey Mare to him.

With theatre director/writer and commedia dell’arte specialist Rosa Campagnaro, I co-created The Attempted Rape of Susanna (or The Marriage of Figaro) an adaptation of the Mozart/Da Ponte opera. Think Mozart meets Kath & Kim meets Emerald Fennel’s Promising Young Woman. Unlike the original Mozart, our adaptation is actually funny, very fast, extremely relatable and finishes more plausibly but more horrifyingly: Susanna raped by her husband Figaro with all the other characters, complicit in the rape culture of the story, looking on.

Stylistically and aesthetically, these operas are chalk and cheese, but they’re about the same theme: how privileged white women capitulate to patriarchal systems in order to keep themselves safe. Such women often think that they benefit from the system, when in reality we all lose. One such system is the opera system, which is why when I invited them to come along, the practitioners there either ignored my work or attacked it. They just don’t like folks who hold up a mirror to them. But the visual arts and theatre sector loved my works. Margaret and the Grey Mare is touring three cities over 2024-2025, and Rosa and I are doing a writing/development residency on our next Mozart adaptation Don Giovanni: Celebrated Sex Pest. The whole situation is kinda bewildering because I am finding the thing opera says it wants i.e. new audiences, but they refuse to innovate to find those audiences. I tried to help them but they won’t accept outside perspectives. Good luck to ‘em!

How do you think the music industry can better support and uplift women artists and composers?

There’s a lot of talk about how we have to have more women at the top. I don’t disagree, but I think for real progress to be made, what we actually need is more feminists at the top. 

Let’s compare two women conductors in Australia right now: Simone Young, Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and Jessica Cottis, Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. Both sensational musicians and deeply committed to the music they champion. It’s very impressive that Simone Young is going to conduct The Ring Cycle in Bayreuth. Amazing achievement to be the first woman to do so, but what is it achieving for women? Nothing really. Her programming for SSO doesn’t fill me with much excitement, because I’ve probably seen all the Strauss and Mahler I need to see live in concert in my lifetime. Young has the position to be able to make a difference, but refuses to use it, having absolutely no demonstrable interest in diverse voices. It’s frustratingly disappointing that she’s not a feminist, but that’s her choice I guess. I wish her all the best.

Jessica Cottis, is from a younger generation of women conductors, clearly just as talented, skilled and passionate about music but has also has a clear commitment to diverse programming. She’s Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of my local band, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, and programs more Australian music and more music by women than any other orchestra in the country. She’s as happy there are she is in the more traditional repertoire which she conducts all over the world which just goes to show, you CAN do both! The Australian composers’ works in the CSO program are not hidden away like they are in other orchestra’s programming. These composers’ works are held up in the foreground, their creators taken seriously for their compelling and relatable contribution to the repertoire, to what it means to be alive here in Australia in the 21st century. What Jess is doing here for the creatives who actually make the repertoire… this is the future of classical music that gets me excited.

Is there a particular piece of music composed by a woman that energises or motivates you? 

Difficult by Amy X Neuburg, for mezzo-soprano, electronics and cello chixtet. https://youtu.be/n6Bl7eXUXVg?si=_mCVRh1OV313tJ1C There’s one line in this sardonically hilarious song that gets me every time: “Everyone knows that nothing is any good unless it’s difficult”. 

Contemporary classical music is a broad church. At one end of the continuum are the art music crowd, where you’ll find all the wild experiments in noise. I like to play and to listen to this kind of stuff (currently on high rotation, ‘Car Pig’ from Zubin Kanga’s album Machine Dreams https://zubinkanga.bandcamp.com/track/car-pig-composed-by-alex-paxton). At the other end are folks who write approachable, pretty stuff, including pop/jazz cross-over etc. I quite like playing and listening to this stuff too, I’ve friends and colleagues who create it and do a wonderful job, like Nat Bartsch and Sally Greenaway. There is sense that ‘serious’ music folks think the latter are somehow… second rate? Whatever, they’re getting much more airplay than the rest of us, so I reckon they’re pretty happy. Haha.

For myself, I used to write only the approachable stuff, which worked pretty well for me when it got around to airplay on Drivetime/Breakfast radio and votes in the ABC Classic 100 (I was the highest placed Australian composer in the Classic 100 Love at no. 27 for a choral setting of She Walks in Beauty, the first work I ever composed in my life). These days, my work sits pretty much exactly in the middle of those two extremes. No one knows where to put it any more. It’s not ‘difficult’ but it’s much more than just ‘pretty’ because of what it’s communicating, particularly in terms of the texts I write. 

I feel good about this situation, because it means I’ve found my voice, my niche. That it doesn’t fit into any of the existing boxes like ‘difficult’ or ‘approachable’ must mean that it’s all mine. And every time I hear Amy X Neuburg singing about what gatekeepers find to be acceptable or not, I laugh my arse off and get on with writing more of my stories in music.

What strategies have you found effective to overcome creative blocks or periods of self doubt?

In 2020, at the height of the Covid lockdowns, I suffered a complete creative block. It was debilitating, terrifying. I let opportunities slide because, for several months, nothing would come out. It was a conversation with my late mother Hoon Chee that shook me out of it, a conversation about that proverb by Lao Tzu, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. She looked at me sternly on FaceTime and said “When are you taking that first step, Sal?” 

So I started a practice of Daily Composition Exercises. I started on 14 October 2020 and haven’t missed a day since. I salute the morning with a cup of coffee, and sit down at my desk with my favourite black roller ball pen and a Spirax manuscript book, and I write. Each day I set a different task, manipulating motifs, creating modes or harmonic languages, working with ostinati or isorhythms or extended techniques or whatever. I write it and put a double bar at the end of it and call it a piece. Some of them are shit and I never look at them again. Some of them are great and become new works like these:

Tiny Dances https://youtu.be/u1UERAZLK24?si=GB5Zvn1E1INYur7r 

The Lockdown Alphabet https://youtu.be/rMkPVKzeYQw?si=pDOPfCgzWMMchs9G

Pictures at an exHERbition https://nga.gov.au/audio-learning-tours/pictures-at-an-exherbition/

I’m proud of these results, but it’s actually not the result that matters so much. It’s the process of doing it. I have really worked hard at building my arsenal of skills, so I now know that I can always write, even on days when I really don’t feel like it. I might have become a bit superstitious about the practice now? I’ve been known to get up at 4am to make sure it’s done before an early flight. I’ve written in bus stations, hospital emergency departments, during hotel breakfasts, when I’ve been struck down with migraines, and during both times I’ve had Covid. I highly recommend creating a daily habit. Perhaps this is the year I’ll finally start running that 8-week course on how to do it.

What advice would you give to young women aspiring to build a career in music?

Three words: Do Not Capitulate.

I see a lot of young classical musicians in my life, high school age musicians, and they have great politics. They’re thoughtful, passionate, justifiably angry about injustices they see and desirous of effecting change. When they grow up and move into tertiary music education and thence into the professional sphere, they start to separate into basically two groups. 

The first group move into the traditional parts of the sector, orchestras, opera companies etc. and give up all their politics. They become invested in the patriarchal systems of classical music because they believe they benefit from it and the approach to the creative life becomes somewhat superficial. Everything is just ‘beautiful’. They’re like the jocks of our industry, doing one thing very well. I think of one young friend who excitedly informed me that she was booked for her first big role in Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte (La Scola Degli Amanti). This opera title translates as “Women Are Like That (or The School for Lovers)”. When I challenged her by asking “Women are like… what, exactly?!” she ghosted me. I’m not hurt. It makes sense for her to capitulate, to embrace the patriarchal misogyny of the canonic repertoire. She’s invested in it because it provides her with a glamorous high profile job, so of course she’s uncomfortable with anyone challenging that. Best of luck to her.

The second group see the problems in the sector and move further into their politics. They tend to do their own thing, work in new music or cross-genre, multidisciplinary stuff. They are more vocal about diversity in the sector and basically try to make a difference. These kids are artists and they give me hope that there is future for the sector.

Sisters in Sync: 3-2-1 with Sharon Grigoryan

3 Questions - 2 Insights - 1 unique photo with remarkable women musicians

We shine a light on the extraordinary cellist Sharon Grigoryan in this month's Sisters in Sync. Sharon's passion for chamber music is evident in her remarkable seven-year tenure as the cellist with the Australian String Quartet, and her ongoing collaboration with her husband, the acclaimed guitarist Slava Grigoryan. Their duo performances are a testament to the deep connection they share, both personally and musically, resulting in profoundly moving experiences.

In our upcoming concert, Luminous, we will be performing Grounded for Cello and Guitar by Australian composer Anne Cawrse, a piece composed in 2021 specifically for Sharon and Slava Grigoryan. Grounded is a celebration of finding solace and joy in simplicity during the challenging times of COVID-19 lockdowns. Its lightness of spirit and infectious joy capture the essence of rediscovering ourselves and the things we cherish most.

Sharon shares her insights, inspirations, and valuable lessons learned throughout her formidable career. Get ready to be inspired by her story!

Who is a female musician that has been a source of inspiration in your musical journey?

Wilma Smith, violinist. She was the concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra whilst I was a university student in Melbourne, and whilst I was a young casual player (and then permanent) player of the MSO. I always admired how she handled all situations with a smile on her face, no matter what was thrown at her from all directions. She was also always so supportive of the students in Melbourne, coming to so many of our concerts, and giving so many masterclasses. She treated everyone around her with equal respect and warmth, from fellow Principal players in the orchestra to young freelancers and students. She was a real ambassador for music in Melbourne. She also had a young family at the time - so she was a busy woman, but had time for everyone.

What's one piece of advice from a woman in music that has stuck with you?

Just be who you are, and that’s enough.

What moment in your career made you feel most empowered as a woman in the music industry?

Leaving my job with the Australian String Quartet. It felt like the majority of our audience base assumed that it was because I was a mother that I needed to leave my job. I enjoyed explaining that this wasn’t solely the case, and that there were many reasons, like wanting to explore other avenues in music, having more variety in what I play, as well as spending more time with my family. Many were surprised to hear that I was leaving to explore other avenues of work, to take risks, despite the fact that I was a mother. It felt wonderful to take matters into my own hands and have full control over my life after a wonderful but extremely demanding period with the quartet. Since then, it’s been wonderful to be able to balance my work and motherhood in a way that is happy and healthy for my family.

What's a valuable lesson you've learned throughout your career?

You can’t change other people, you can only change yourself. 

What advice would you give to young women aspiring to build a career in music?

What some people see as female passiveness is actually our great strength. We may not argue a point until we’re blue in the face, we may indeed sacrifice what we really want in order to keep the peace with a colleague who just “must” have it their way. We may “lose” an argument, because we are actually full of self-doubt in that moment and questioning if we really are right or wrong. This self-questioning, this willingness to sacrifice what we want in order to keep the peace, is, what I’ve realised, our greatest strength. “Being right” isn’t strong. Being flexible is. Women, in general, are great diplomats and listeners.