My Brilliant Career: Behind the music with composer Matthew Hindson
When I start to tell people about My Brilliant Career, my first instinct is to immediately qualify, "Not mine!" I have been lucky in my life as a classically-based composer because I have written many large-scale works for ballet companies, orchestras and chamber groups all over the world. But I have never written a piece like this one.
This is my second-ever narrative ballet, and my first with the brilliant choreographer, Cathy Marston. Commissioned by Queensland Ballet, it's my first ever piece in which I have set and evoked a 19th-century landscape: the sometimes harsh and forbidding country of rural New South Wales in which the ballet is set. My music is very much rooted in today, in contemporary 21st-century Australian life. I can't change this – it's who I am. So in this piece, I was faced with the conundrum of how to reflect the setting of the story, and especially the motives of the characters, in a musical way that would not seem out of place either in the late 19th century or today.
Company Pianist Dan Le, playing an excerpt from My Brilliant Career
Apart from the fact that the story was written by a young woman, people's experiences must have been so substantially different from our lives over a century later. Many of the social norms and conventions have irrevocably changed. Sybylla (or Syb and Bylla, in our case) receiving two proposals at such a young age is one example – it's quite inconceivable for a young woman to be dealing with this as opposed to going to university and pursuing a career.
The fabulous opportunity arising from this ballet was that I used the traditional way of associating characters with musical ideas, but even more so, I based the music firmly in melody and musical forms from the past. For example, in the first flirtatious, romantic scene between the Sybyllas and Harry, I imagined a fictitious 1930s film track, with the characters swooning all over one another. Grandmother is represented by a musical figure that could be found in a French Baroque overture from the 1700s. There is a garden party that is very prim and proper (at the beginning at least) with a string quartet providing the background music. There's even a bush dance!
The other interesting approach to me in writing this piece was considering the characters in music. The Sybyllas are represented by an ascending line, representing an optimistic (if at times headstrong) future. Harry is more 'grounded', more forthright. Aunt Helen is caring yet a little fussy with the girls. Frank... well, you'll see and hear what sort of a person he is. At times, Cathy and I had very different viewpoints on one of the characters in particular. This is the thrill of collaborating on such a piece as this. We may come from different places, but the result is that we end up with a nuanced, multi-layered piece of art.
It has been a genuine thrill to work on My Brilliant Career, and I can't wait to see and hear the final product.
Matthew Hindson
Composer, My Brilliant Career
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We are delighted to be bringing the world première ballet adaptation of My Brilliant Career to the stage as part of our triple bill, Trilogy. Book your tickets now.
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