v_1: Kyla Matsuura-Miller / Babicka

Magnetic violinist Kyla Matsuura-Miller and her quartet kick off Series Six with American minimalist icon Steve Reich’s landmark work ‘Different Trains.’ Composed in 1988 for string quartet and tape, the piece uses recorded speech to create melodic lines, “The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments,” Reich writes. An extended meditation on the Holocaust, the piece came from the composer’s childhood memory of travelling on trains back and forth between LA and New York, and his adult reflection that had he been a child in Europe in the 1940s his fate may have been very different, “As a Jew, I would have had to ride on very different trains.”

Following ‘Different Trains’ the quartet skip back 900 years and dive into the otherworldly drone-based music of 12th Century German composer, philosopher and mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Born in 1098 Hildegard was educated at a local Benedictine monastery. From a young age she experienced visions, and was celebrated during her lifetime as a prophetess. She wrote widely—on topics including medicine and science—and was also a prolific poet and composer. Her musical legacy—which includes almost 80 works—is one of the largest of any medieval composer.

Australian Youth Orchestra