Journey Home is a collaboration featuring music for solo piano and film created by Andrea Keller – piano/composition, Erik Keller – photographs, and Hayley Miro Browne – projections/visuals/photographs. The compositions and improvisations presented in Journey Home are the result of extensive explorations I have conducted into the compositional processes and techniques of contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. As a result of my research I have created a series of templates that form the basis of the improvisations and compositions.
NTRO Output Type
- Recorded or Rendered Work
NTRO Output Category
- Recorded or Rendered Work : Performance
Place
Melbourne, AustraliaEnd Date
2020-09-25Medium
Recorded music with videoResearch Statement
Journey Home is a collaboration of solo piano and film created by Andrea Keller (piano/composition), Erik Keller (photographs), and Hayley Miro Browne (projections/visuals/photographs). Inspired by the words of Allan Browne, ‘every great story is usually about the journey home’, this collaboration centres on 9 new works and improvisations composed and performed live by Keller, alongside a film created by Browne, bringing together images of Australia and the Czech Republic in the 1970s & 80s (captured by Keller’s late father Erik Keller) and today.
The compositions and improvisations in Journey Home are the result of extensive exploration into the compositional processes and techniques of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. My PhD research titled Waves & Schemes: Reconciling Arvo Pärt’s compositional processes and techniques within an improvised practice explores the diagrams/schemes, and the Waves concept in Pärt’s music. Through a series of improvisations and ‘brick tests’ (exercises in divergent thinking) based on Pärt’s diagrams, in addition to the assimilation of specific compositional techniques into improvisational lexicon, I have created a series of templates (or generative models) that form the basis of the improvisations and compositions.
The work premiered at the Melbourne Women’s International Jazz Festival on 6 Dec 2019 at the Ian Potter Southbank Centre, Melbourne. The music of Journey Home was formally recorded in Jan/Feb 2020, and officially released on CD, digital, and DVD on 25 Sep 2020. The music was recorded on three Australian Stuart & Sons pianos, and received extremely positive feedback from company founder and designer Wayne Stuart AM. The album has been reviewed in Rhythms magazine, the New York City Jazz Record, was streamed as part of SIMA’s online ‘Meditations in Jazz Series’ during 2020, and was included in the best 10 albums of 2020 in the New York City Jazz Record (nominated by Laurence Donahue-Greene)Size or Duration of Work
52 minutesAffiliation
Andrea Keller Meagher, University of Melbourne
