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Helen Gramotnev

KNEALE HOLDS HER OWN AT BRISBANE MUSIC FESTIVAL


Female musician with bob-length hair with left arm around a cello

What a refreshing experience of music with Melbourne artist Gemma Kneale at the Brisbane Music Festival this weekend! Hold Your Own is a cello-electronics concert, and a testament to this artist’s ability to create a full, stimulating, and engaging music experience with a solo performance. Curated by Kneale herself, the concert takes us through a journey of experimental contemporary music for cello that mixes this classical instrument with electronics to create a unique listening experience.


It offers the full spectrum of human emotions from excitement and exhilaration to anxiety, anguish, uncertainty, and doubt. The concert opens with Fits + Starts by Anna Clyne (2003), a piece commissioned for a dance group. It invites us to experience performance that transforms music into layered visions of strings and voice, electronic and real instruments, in a musically provocative way. Oscillating between tension and anxiety, and calmness and melodic harmony, this piece glances back towards classical composition, to occasionally bring us back down to earth from the heights of its wild and unbridled energy.


The next piece was one of my favourites: A Thousand Tongues by Missy Mazzoli (2011) responds to a text by Stephen Crane, which, in Kneale’s own words, conveys just “how challenging it is to be truly authentic”. The cello melody flows continuously in this piece, wrapped in the electronic effects interlacing throughout. But which is the tongue that speaks the truth? Kneale’s physical handling of the cello reminds us that the stringed instrument is often associated with the human voice. The cellist transcends the performance space by speaking through the cello as clearly and articulated as she does while introducing the pieces to the audience.


Another personal highlight was Cello Solo – A Game by Kate Neal (2023), developed as part of a larger work integrating music, sound, movement, visual media. Like a dance with many characters, weaving in and out of view, the piece creates rhythmic motion through textural sound landscape. It evokes the sense of time mercilessly moving forward, unchanging and unwavering. Not surprisingly this composition in its larger version involved choreography – and we cannot help but see the dance unfold before us!


From curiosity to anxiety and uncertainly, to optimism and positivity, this concert is a rollercoaster of human emotions, presented in small enough doses to stimulate the audience without dwelling on any one emotion for too long. And what better way to finish this invigorating music experience than with Honeyed Words by Anna Meredith (2016)! This short but powerful piece is full of resilience, positivity, and optimism. It brings together all the threads of this masterfully curated concert, leaving you with warm, inspired feeling inside.


We cannot wait to see Gemma Kneale at Brisbane Music Festival again and hope she will return for the 2025 edition of this Brisbane gem.

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