Q&A: Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award recipient, Larry Sitsky AM

This morning, APRA AMCOS and the AMC announced composer, pianist and scholar Larry Sitsky AMwill be the recipient of the 2015 Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award.

Recognised for his monumental contribution to Australian music, Sitsky will receive this honour at the 2015 ART Music Awards ceremony at Sydney’s City Recital Hall on Tuesday August 11.

Having worked with every major orchestra in Australia, with over 200 pieces on his list of works, and with an academic career which saw him study at the San Francisco Conservatory, the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, and the School of Music in Canberra, Sitsky has previously been honoured with a Member of the Order of Australia and the prestigious Don Banks Award.

Now 80, Sitsky continues to compose and perform;his latest work, as he tells TMN, is “aimed exclusively at the computer viewer.”

Sitsky chats to TMN about classical music’s image problem, the secret to recruiting younger generations and why the Whitlam years were the most progressive.

You’re being awarded for Distinguished Services to Australian Music, what do you deem your greatest accomplishment?

A tough ask. I am tempted to say that my greatest accomplishment will be the next project I undertake. I say this simply because I look to the future, not the past, as I think the past is there to be judged and assessed already; the future is the challenge of tomorrow. Currently, I have started work on a grand opera aimed exclusively at the computer viewer, exploiting the possibilities offered by the current state of the art, many of which are impossible in a live theatre.

Thomas Mann's DR FAUSTUS is now out of copyright and that is what I have chosen. As a little warm-up to get to know the technology and techniques, I am writing a melodrama with piano based on Yeats' PURGATORY, one of his last plays.

You’ve watched the Australian music industry take on many forms, do you have a favourite year in terms of your own enjoyment and the industry’s effectiveness?

I believe that the Whitlam years were the ones that imbued us with most optimism, expectations that were subsequently slowly drained away in subsequent years, and which are running at a low ebb currently, with savage cuts to the arts and education. We have to fight this, and continue to produce, against all odds and all philistines.

Last year BBC screened a documentary titled Addicts Symphony about the claims of widespread drink and drug addiction among the classicists. Is there a misassumption about classical players that they don’t partake in debauchery?

These people have no idea how much discipline and sheer hard labour goes into the making of a classical performer. The constant aspiration towards a state of perfection cannot be achieved without the highest self-criticism and physical/mental fitness. It looks easy from an audience perspective, but that is an illusion created by mastery of the art.

Do you think classical music has an image problem?

Yes, it probably has, but then, image is not everything is it? I don't think we should shirk from using the term "elite" either. We seem proud of our elite athletes, but it is politically incorrect in education circles to talk about art as being elite. The product of art is certainly available to everyone, but becoming a practitioner is not given to everyone. In this age of instant gratification, it appears to be a problem for the listener to do some homework before going to a concert, hence the tendency to perform only 'safe' repertoire, not challenging the listener, and thus relegating much 'classical' music to a museum art.

What’s the secret to recruiting younger generations onto classical music?

Our performing bodies need to play a part in educating the audience. If they are not game, then everything winds up chasing its own tail. It is absurd to think that we can shock a 21st century audience with music now a hundred years old! The easy way is to offer the audience lollipops, but I for one would never contemplate such a thing. Art evolves and challenges- otherwise it is just that- a lollipop. Composition is not composition unless it is ever concerned with new problems and the search for new solutions.

It’s been 60 years since you graduated from New South Wales Conservatorium, what does classical music mean to you now, compared to what it meant to you in 1955?

Every day I learn how little I know and how much new repertoire there is out there to explore. But my extraordinary piano teacher at the Conservatorium, Winifred Burston, was a free spirit who was always keenly unearthing new material away from the beaten track for her students.

For those who want to explore your work, which pieces are best to start with?

Probably something more based on folk material from my many works, for example my 2nd Violin Concerto. For young pianists, there are all those pieces in my CENTURY collection. Although I am probably known as a 'difficult' composer, paradoxically, a lot of my music is based on folksong and chant. There is much to choose from, as my compositions now number in the hundreds.

Which concerto could you play over and over again?

The Busoni Piano Concerto with male choir, lasting well over an hour.

Previous recipients of the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award:

2011 – John Hopkins OBE & Patrick Thomas MBE

2012 – Peter Sculthorpe

2013 – George Dreyfus

2014 – Richard Gill

2015 – Larry Sitsky AM

Performances at the 2015 Art Music Awards will include an excerpt of Iain Grandage and Alison Croggon’s opera The Riders (based on the Tim Winton modern classic), which will be performed by soprano Jessica Aszodi, baritone Barry Ryan, Helena Rathbone and Lizzie Jones (violins), Justin Williams (viola), Leah Lynn (cello), and James Crabb (accordion) with the composer and ART Music Awards finalist Iain Grandage on piano.

James Crabb will also perform an excerpt of Damian Barbeler’s Shadow Box with the composer, who is also an ART Music Awards finalist. A Work of the Year finalist in 2015, Shadow Box combines live music with projected imagery and interactive technologies that reveal a secret circus of the imagination.

The Sydney Children’s Choir will be joined on stage by conductor Matthew Winnel and pianist Sally Whitwell to perform Kate Miller-Heidke and Keir Nuttall’s, Our Song, arranged by composer Dan Walker, and ART Music Awards finalist Joseph Twist’s work Rain Dream. Rain Dream tells the story of a child who lives in the Australian bush and has never seen rain, and who dreams of a thunderstorm.

Multi award-winning Australian trumpeter and composer Phil Slater will perform his composition The Cutting and The Shrine. Phil will be joined onstage by drummer Simon Barker and Carl Dewhurst on guitar. Directed by Patrick Nolan, the performance will feature physical performer, dancer, choreographer and artist Kathryn Puie and video design by Andrew Wholley.