In August I went on a three week trip to Europe where I attended a composition workshop in Wales and a music conference in Germany with a bit of fun in between. The trip was an opportunity for me to explore ideas and concepts as well as network with people in relation to my PhD research project about site-specific composition.

The trip was not so much a sightseeing tour of Europe, but rather travelling to small out of the way towns where these quirky events were happening. My first stop was a small creative university town in the north west of Wales called Aberystwyth. There was a composition workshop that I heard about at the Centre for Performance Research (CPR) with Argentinean composer Oscar Edelstein. He is a very influential, creative and forward thinking composer who was brimming with enthusiasm, knowledge and imagination. This was a very inspirational four days talking about his composition concepts and opening my mind up to so much new music. He was also very helpful to identify my compositional weaknesses and ways to improve on them. A great man!

From “Aber” I travelled to Liverpool to visit friends Dan Thorne and Mersy Wylie. We were all in WAYJO together years ago and Dan was a sax player in MFO from 2005 – 2010. Great to see they are doing well. Dan has a great album coming out soon which he recorded in Perth before he left.

From there I flew to Frankfurt where I spent a few days catching up with Ed Partyka and saxophonist Oliver Leicht from the Frankfurt Radio Big Band. I was shown around the facilities of HDR (the local radio/television station). Amazing! Each province in Germany has its own radio/television station and most of them have a symphony orchestra and big band which supplies culture to their citizens. The big band rehearse and perform new programs of new music every week which are recorded live and broadcast on radio and sometimes television.  The last state funded creative big band oasis in the world (besides WAYJO of course).  Check out their performance space…

Now off to the conference held in Dieburg – which is pretty much a train station and a university. Not the most picturesque village to finish the trip but the conference was very interesting and again opened me up to so much new music and sound art as well as new ways of thinking about what music/sound really is. The four day conference was hosted by the World Forum of Sound Ecology. The legendary soundscape artist R.M Schafer was there and well as many academics, artists and postgrad students from around the world. Almost everyone who presented their research and artistic ideas did so in a second language – English!  It was unbelievable that they could all put forward such complicated ideas in a second language, making me feel even stupider than I already am. The conference was really varied in topics from scientific to creative to conceptual to boring. I got a lot out of the trip and now it is back to work making sure I get this research project done for my studies.