Anamnesis

Overview:

Anamnesis is a new, 10-minute work for brass quintet, for the Australian National Academy of Music’s student brass players, led by ANAM faculty member Karina Filipi (tuba). The work extends Thomas Green’s examination of music in relation to people, bodies, lives, and culture by focusing particularly on the emotional dimensions of gendered abuse in the classical music industry. Drawing upon Richard Shusterman’s somaesthetics (Shusterman, 2018), this work explores the meliorative potential of composition in social crises. Thomas Green employs the term manifold composition to signify a composition’s dualistic potential as both a process and final product. The former is embodied, especially in the collaboration of performers and composer, thus demonstrating a composition’s meliorative potential, in Shusterman’s sense (2018 pp.1-4). Premiering at the McClelland Gallery (Victoria) in August 2024, and later performed at ANAM in November 2024,the work incorporates the notated score while also emphasizing the process—its development, audiovisual production, and performances (in this case, a micro-documentary about the work).

Aims:

The central research aim was to explore the emotional experience of engaging with recent reports on the abuse of women in classical music, especially in the sphere of brass instrumental music. This was addressed through the creation of an original ten-minute musical work for brass quintet.

This research also contributes towards a broader inquiry into the role of the composer in relationship with communities and culture through lives and bodies, responding to concepts of art as experience (Shusterman, 2018), and music as something that is done (Small, 1998). Anamnesis is a work whose bounds extend beyond the “reified” (Small, p.2) product to include the human relationships in its development. Thus the documentative materials here complete a manifold composition.