Ensemble Offspring are Sydney’s musical mavericks, uniting the most innovative instrumentalists in Australia with a broad collective of collaborators to explore new ideas through living new music. Led by acclaimed percussionist Claire Edwardes OAM, the ensemble comprises a core line-up of some of Australia’s most well-regarded musicians, championing living composers and creating musical experiences that stimulate the senses and pique curiosity. Ensemble Offspring supports emerging and as-yet-unheard composers, in particular championing Australian female-identifying and First Nations artists.

Ensemble Offspring were awarded the 2019 Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award as well as the State Luminary Award in the 2021 Art Music Awards for consistently high quality performances, breadth of repertoire, and commitment to collaboration for 25 years. Committed to subverting the classical music tradition with experiential concerts of living new music across genre, place and art form, Ensemble Offspring are navigating the future with open mindedness, flexibility and joy!

Inspired by the behaviour and mating rituals of bower birds, The Visitor (sorry, I can’t stay) draws on themes of display, dance, and a kind of gentle rejection. The additive textures are suggestive of the building of bowers, and musical fragments are re-arranged and reframed in different guises throughout the piece. The piece views the male bower bird as a sort of stressed host, madly re-decorating and arranging the furniture

This work scored for flute, clarinet and vibraphone was written for Ensemble Offspring in 2015 during a residency at the Sydney Conservatorium. It was inspired by the beautiful rainbow lorikeets that visit me every morning and who dance after a feeding frenzy. This led me to many hours of documenting bird call and transcribing melodic fragments derived from not only lorikeets but also other Australian birds including butcher birds, magpies, and even a nightingale (also a musical reference to Lamorna Nightingale, our flautist). There is much melodic dialogue between the parts in Lorikeet Corroboree just as birds in the forest do not sing in isolation but in melodic collaboration, by answering each other’s musical sentences.

Fiona Loader is an accompanist, singer and freelance composer. She completed her Master’s degree in Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 2016, studying with Paul Stanhope. She was a music fellow (composer in residence) at Trinity Grammar School in 2016. She has had works performed or commissioned by numerous ensembles such as Halcyon Ensemble, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s early music ensemble, and Leichhardt Espresso Chorus. Her works have also been recorded for broadcast by ABC FM, Fine Music and performed as part of Musica Viva and the Four Winds Festival.

Of Stars and Birds was written after an invitation to contribute to Ensemble Offspring’s birdsong collection. As a new composer in the earliest development stages of my craft, I worried how my work would stand alongside the pieces of experienced, accomplished composers who had already contributed to this series. As an Aboriginal musician with limited music theory, I also worried if I could create something of a standard suitable for the ensemble and its project partners. In times like this I look to culture to provide guidance. I quickly realised Yuwaalaraay knowledge, connection and relationship to birds equaled the complexity and detail of advanced musical theory, compositional practice and creative conception. So I worked hard to imbue this piece with the things I know well, cultural concepts and knowledge, enabling a transformation away from a commissioned composition and into an extension of my own lived and practiced cultural experience.

Of Stars and Birds developed then from a significant Yuwaalaraay story ending in the creation of the southern cross but traversing the enormity of land, lore, death and rebirth. Birds weave this story into our dreaming cosmos, the conventional limitations of earth, sky, death, day, life and night dissolving and creating its own universe of existence- a bit like my compositional craft, a mixture of traditions and teachings, an extension of the storytelling and songmaking of Australia’s First People’s and the explorations and expressions of a new composer at the beginning of an exciting musical journey.

The road from Alice Springs heading out to the East Ranges runs in fits and starts for 80 kilometres before ending at Ross River. The pied butcherbird recording heard in and transcribed for this composition was made at Bitter Springs Creek, 6.6 kilometres before the road terminates. These feathered songsters were recorded nocturnally on 17 August 2014.

Bitter Springs Creek 2014 belongs to the twenty-first century, to be sure, but the music sung by these birds is ancient, extending back millions of years. Although they may share some phrases, each bird has their own unique songs that develop and transform from season to season. A degree of what we may describe as improvisation pertains to each performance, and this quality of flexibility is key to the work.

Hollis Taylor is a violinist/composer, ornithologist, and author living in Sydney. Her practice takes in sound and radiophonic arts, and performing (re)compositions of Australian pied butcherbird songs on violin with outback field recordings. Her book, Is Birdsong Music? Outback Encounters with an Australian Songbird, and her double CD, Absolute Bird, were recently released. These works are a collaboration with partner Jon Rose who is an iconic experimental violinist, composer and improviser. Jon has created large environmental multimedia works, engaged with interactive electronic systems, built experimental musical instruments, and created radiophonic works. In 2009 the Kronos Quartet commissioned him to write and build Music from 4 Fences for the Sydney Opera House and in 2012 he was awarded the Don Banks Award for lifetime achievement and contribution to Australian music.

Mungala is the word for clouds in composer Brenda Gifford’s Yuin country, the South Coast of NSW. The music evokes the experience of watching the clouds build across the sea from a clifftop at Wreck Bay. The clouds dance across the sky bringing thunder and then the relief of gentle rain.

Falling Embers was composed as a meditation for peace and relief from the fires that raged fiercely across our land. The work traces a glowing particle suspended above desolate land where all has been lost and destroyed. Falling Embers represents the last moments of something.

When I was 11 years old I noticed a huge, peculiar cloud in the sky. It was New Years Day, the start of 2002, and the whole family was milling about the kitchen in pyjamas. Unaware of what I was seeing, or what this unusual cloud signalled, I continued with my breakfast and the merriment of New Year’s Day. Twenty minutes later our neighbour rang the doorbell, and in his broken English he told me “The fire is coming!”. We ran to the upstairs balcony and looked out to see a valley of bellowing smoke and flames. Cheltenham, my home, was on fire. One of my strongest memories comes from the evening that followed, after the army of fire engines retreated and a feeling of safety restored. My sister Kate and I awoke in the lounge room. We stood side by side and gazed out through the big glass doors and watched as embers fell like hot snow from the sky all over our backyard. They melted and turned to ash as they hit the damp soil. We thanked the wind that day, and the modest creek that saved our home from burning fire. The elements were certainly on our side that day.

Ella Macens (1991) is a fast-emerging Sydney based composer with a passion for choral, orchestral and chamber music. Ella has received the Frank Hutchens Scholarship for Composition, the Fine Music FM Young Composer Award and was part of the Composing Women program at the Sydney Conservatorium 2016-2018. Capturing qualities from both popular and classical music styles, her musical voice is heavily influenced by her Latvian heritage.

Beautiful Birds showcases birds in 3 distinctive movements:

1. Lyrebirds – skittish, quirky birds with a mischievous temperament and an astounding penchant for mimicry;
2. Flamingos – elegant, stately yet slightly melancholic creatures;
3. Hummingbirds – fluttering, quivering souls flitting from one gorgeous blossom to the next.

A true exploration of the trio’s virtuosity, Beautiful Birds sets these joyous bird calls into dexterous, interwoven lines. While Lyrebirds establishes the piece as a highly energy celebration of sonic colours, Flamingos explores delicious and still moments of quiet conversation between the three instruments. The piece finishes with Hummingbirds, mimicking the fast yet ever changing humming in an impressive display of swift-flying unison lines.

Gerard Brophy is an Australian composer who began his studies in the classical guitar at the age of twenty-two. He has since developed a keen interest in collaborating with artists from other disciplines and he is particularly active in the areas of ballet, dance and electronica. He has also been involved in exciting collaborations with musicians from other cultures.