Living Instruments Exhibition

The Living Instruments Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music and the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne. Supported generously by a Melbourne Engagement Grant, this project multi-sampled the unique Grainger tuned percussion collection and explored ways these samples could then be turned into digital instruments – historically preserving the sound of the original instruments, but also investigating ways these sounds might be more widely accessed.

The following playlist by Interactive Composition students at the University of Melbourne reflects this sampling and instrument building process, and importantly examines how contemporary makers are not just preservers of sound but creative agents. Using these digital sampled instruments, (and a little creative freedom!), this playlist represents a range of new works reflecting the sampling process and a sound world from our own time.

HOW IT PLAYS: INNOVATIONS IN PERCUSSION ONLINE
How it plays is a collaborative exhibition and performance project, involving the Grainger Museum, Federation Handbells (Museums Victoria/Creative Victoria), Speak Percussion, the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, and Melbourne School of Design.

This exhibition shines a light on selected innovations in percussion, focussing on Melbourne, over a period of 140 years. It brings together a range of percussion instruments that have been created, composed for, and played by radical musicians, who have sought to change the way we can all hear, and play, music. Starting with Percy Grainger’s ground-breaking compositional experiments in ‘tuneful percussion’ in the first half of the twentieth century, How it plays then explores the work of the first truly innovative Australian percussion group, APE, in the 1970s, who experimented on Percy Grainger’s own instruments in the Grainger Museum as they evolved their practice. Jumping to the twenty-first century, the exhibition explores the musical and social phenomenon of the Federation Handbells, which engages acoustic and artistic innovation to bring the playing of bells to a wide range of communities. It concludes with an immersion in the sonic and artistic adventures in sound and performance of Melbourne organisation, Speak Percussion, an international leader in the field of experimental and new music.

The exhibition is on display at the Grainger Museum from 8 May 2019 to June 2020.