Covid Mantras

When Covid struck I knew what I wanted to do. In the spirit of my studies into musical disruption I aimed for home studio perfection. I wanted to see how lifelike I could make new classical music, to break the ivory tower of the concert hall as the place where high art is made, so I made a song cycle, it’s posh for album! This project houses songs and poems. Here are the songs, the poems are next door at 'Covid Sonnets'.

Covid Mantras was made at home during lock down. I contacted a number of writers, who wrote and recorded poems of response onto portable audio recorders I posted to them. In the cases where we could (legally) meet I recorded them. What did the writers do? They responded to loss, sometimes by looking at a major event in their own lives, sometimes comparing social isolation to the climate crisis, sometimes processing their own grief and loss. This is Covid Sonnets.

After the poems were recorded I spent some weeks conducting field recordings within the 5km radius I was allowed to cover on my daily walks. I combined them with the poems to complete the first stage of the project. I then started my song cycle. I knew the cycle would be about loss, about people dying or withering away from the inside in social isolation. I wanted to make a requiem for those who lived and died alone, especially after one of the poets passed away during the project.

The fact that the recording was undertaken in a bedroom is not new for popular music, though it is still a relatively novel process in art music. This was also the first piece of vocal music I composed entirely through improvisation. The piano parts were played in one take, with no pre-planning. Vocal parts were improvised over the piano, recorded onto my phone, then sent to the singer. There was no score.

The piano, a symbol of the dominance of the 19th and 20th centuries is no longer the king of the heap. I played a nearly fifty-year old Kawai piano of limited sound quality. The music was recorded with as many microphones as I could fit around the piano, to capture its resonance. The voice was recorded after the piano as with popular music.

Soprano Heather Lee, a long-time collaborator, recorded the song cycle on a tube microphone designed for popular music. This made the voice sound extremely close to the listener. Lee recorded mostly in one take, continuing the improvisatory aesthetic of the project. Both piano and voice were sent to an artificial reverb to give the impression of a concert hall, in this case the splendid hall of the ANU.

The work was recorded, edited and mixed entirely on headphones, something that is frowned upon by audio professionals, as certain frequencies are boosted unnaturally by them. There is also no crosstalk, the mixing of sound between two speakers, an effect that aids mixing.

This album is a series of invocations or prayers so I offer you two:

May we remember the service that our artists gave us during the isolation of the pandemic. May we see the role of the arts as crucial to our well-being. May we be makers of art and supporters of the arts. May the arts inspire and delight us for ever more.

May each of us play a part in making a world of greater justice. May we meaningfully respond to the forced dispossession of our First Nations, for this land was never ceded. May we fix this planet before we burn it. (Cunio, 2021).