Talking (to) sculptures @ Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2011

Wednesday 9 November 2011, 1:33 PM
By The Team | Posted in Events and Places and Things

by Courtney Lynch

Call me old-fashioned, but I expected to walk around and look at an exhibition of sculptures, not for the sculptures to wander past and strike up a conversation with me.

Stuart Ringholt’s Do you want to talk about sculpture? is one of the sculptures that may challenge your expectations at the exhibition of finalists for the 2011 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture at Fed Square.

Chatting with Stuart, I discover that he arrives at Fed Square each day with a different object in order to prompt passers-by into a conversation about ‘sculpture.’ Yesterday he came dressed all in purple; today he brought a beautiful vase of his neighbour’s roses, which look somewhat lonely and incongruous against the sharp edges and angled planes of Fed Square.

I leave Stuart chasing a reluctant conversationalist and brave the rain on the Upper Square to check out the other finalists. The sound of someone calling their dog coaxes me towards We, The Masters, the creation by sound, video and installation artists Sonia Leber and David Chesworth. Fragments of vinyl bunting hang in gum trees, highlighting a soundscape built up from hundreds of vocalisations of people talking to their animals. In the absence of any animals, the work calls out to you: beckoning, cajoling, controlling.

Across the square, Clive Murray-White’s Sara Delaney – a head of her time gazes beatifically at people taking shelter under nearby canopies. The rain doesn’t bother her. Her hint of a smile reminds me of that other famous almost-smiling lady hanging in the Louvre.

I reach the most physically imposing of the sculptures, the towering Apostle No 2. In the tropical drizzle of a late November Melbourne morning, it looks like a melting iceberg that’s become marooned in a sandstone desert. A little kid toddles up and licks the dripping sculpture. His mother drags him away, but he manages to give it a parting kick with his tiny gumboot. Unlike the limestone monolith member of the 12 Apostles that toppled into the ocean – which this piece of art parodies – this Apostle stands steadfast.

As the drizzle becomes a drenching, I abandon the hunt for Tom Nicholson’s Unfinished monument to Batman’s Treaty and Bianca Hester’s a world, fully accessible by no living being. For all I know, they’ve beaten a retreat from the weather themselves.

Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2011 @ Fed Square
Until 21 November 2011
www.melbourneprizetrust.org/mp2011

Warm up with Hot Spots

Thursday 16 June 2011, 12:04 PM
By The Team | Posted in Places and Things

If this is the first time you’ve heard of Hot Spots, you can be sure it won’t be the last.

This nifty little guidebook to our city comes out twice a year, in winter and summer, to inform and inspire food buffs, shoppers, art aficionados, music lovers and tourists alike.

Whether it’s an exhibition, a shop, a restaurant, a bar or a tour, if it’s new, little known, has been reinvented or even resurrected, we’ll find it.

We’re pretty pleased with the latest winter edition and we hope you like it as much as we do.

You can pick up your own copy for free at various cafes, bars and shops throughout the city, including 1000 £ Bend, Alice Euphemia, Captains of Industry, Cumulus, FAT, Hell’s Kitchen, Lenko Boutique, Mr Tulk and the Kino Cinemas.

So, rug up, grab your copy of Hot Spots and see Melbourne in a new light this winter.

Pulling out all the stops

Wednesday 11 May 2011, 12:46 PM
By The Team | Posted in Events and People and Places and Things

There is much about the amazing Town Hall Grand Organ that is hidden from view. We’ve pulled out all the stops to bring you this enlightening Q&A with City Music Coordinator Ariel Valent.

The City of Melbourne’s Grand Organ dominates the Town Hall with its array of pipes. How many pipes are there altogether?

A very good question! Even the experts disagree and one person assigned the task to physically count the pipes would surely lose count. The most up-to-date count is 9592. These range from a few centimetres tall to 32 feet.

Organs are made up of many other parts in addition to the pipes, including ‘manuals’ and ‘stops’. What are the manuals and stops and what role do they play?

The ‘manuals’ are the keyboards that the organist plays with their hands. The ‘stops’ are the knobs that get pulled out to let certain pipes play. The expression ‘to pull out all the stops’ is a reference to the organist’s ability to pull out all the stops on an organ to activate all the pipes and create a very big sound. When all of the Melbourne Town Hall Grand Organ’s stops are out, the result is extremely loud.

What other interesting aspects of the organ are hidden from view?

Whilst the facade is impressive, most of the organ is hidden behind. There are thousands of pipes, lots of bellows, two huge blowers, a set of chimes and two drums! The organ also has its own bathroom, and there is even a museum that details the fascinating history of the instrument, including the fire that destroyed the original organ in 1925. Most of these hidden treasures can be seen in free tours that the City of Melbourne runs every weekday.

Can a piano player play an organ, or do you need special training?

A piano player can begin to learn to play the organ, but an organist definitely needs specialist teaching and a lot of practice: they have to be able to play with their feet and understand all the different sounds and how they can work together. The City of Melbourne has approached particular piano/keyboard players and given them time to get to know the Grand Organ. It’s a massive instrument with a lot of complexity, so this takes some time.

Australia’s own world-renowned concert organist Thomas Heywood first played the Grand Organ at age 16. How did he get such an amazing opportunity?

Thomas showed himself to be a brilliant musician at a very young age. As a proud Melburnian and an enthusiastic organist, he was an obvious choice to play the Town Hall Grand Organ. Times have changed, but the Melbourne Town Hall is still the people’s hall, and the City of Melbourne gives opportunities for promising young organists to practise at the Town Hall.

What kind of music sounds best on the organ? Is it written specifically for the organ?

You will get a lot of different responses to this question. There is an exceptional repertoire of music written specifically for the pipe organ spanning 400 years, and it is hard to go past the contrapuntal music of Johann Sebastian Bach. But some organists, including Thomas Heywood, have become experts at taking music originally written for orchestra and transcribing it for the Grand Organ, which makes a lot of sense when you consider the vast array of instruments that can be played by the organ.

In the 1991 film The Commitments, one of the characters plays Procol Harum’s 1967 hit ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ on a church organ. Do you think modern or contemporary music can be played on an organ?

Absolutely. Ollie McGill, who plays keyboards with the Cat Empire, did a show with his very modern trio The Genie a couple of years back, and each year there is a show called Dis-organ-eyes-d which features the next generation of Melbourne’s composers and sound designers creating new works for the organ using its up-to-date MIDI technology.

What is the Organ-ic Lunch series?

Running since 2004, this series gives residents of Melbourne as well as visitors the chance to hear the Grand Organ in action. Entry is free and the concerts feature organists from Melbourne, Australia and beyond. In the most recent one, German organist Elke Voelker performed a new soundtrack to an old black-and-white film, and the next one in July features prize-winning young organist Nicole Marane, originally from Canberra but now making great strides in the USA.

The Grand Organ underwent extensive restoration between 1999 and 2001 at a cost of $4.5 million dollars. How did this change or improve the quality of the sound?

The refurbishment was a major undertaking. Firstly it fixed all the pipes that had become unusable and, secondly, it added about 3000 pipes. This added a whole new tonal range, and really filled out the middle section. Since the refurbishment, I have never heard an organist complain that they couldn’t find the exact sound that they were looking for. They say there used to be ghosts in the organ, but these haven’t been sighted since the refurbishment, so that may have affected the sound as well.

Melbourne’s first grand organ was built in 1872 when the city was flush with money from the gold rush. Do you think an organ is something the city can sustain in these modern times?

It was certainly a brave step for the City of Melbourne to invest so heavily in what some regard as a historical relic. However, the costs of maintaining the instrument are now modest. It’s 10 years since it was refurbished and each year more than 10,000 people come to hear the organ played, plus all the people who appreciate it at functions and speech nights. For a cultural city like Melbourne, it is a necessity!