The Orchestra and The Big Bang: ACO’s Timeline

Over the past several years, the Australian Chamber Orchestra has played an annual multimedia concert in collaboration with a number of renowned creatives, including photographers Bill Henson (Luminous) and Jon Frank (The Crowd and The Reef). This year, as part of Sydney’s annual Vivid winter festival of lights, music and ideas, the ACO performed Timeline in collaboration with The Presets and, as the concert’s tagline proclaims, life flashed before your very ears. A flick through the concert’s program proves just how mind-bendingly vast and crazy an undertaking it was.

“Let me introduce to you:” How I met The Beatles

If you wanted to, you can pinpoint the day I started listening to music and looking at films. I mean really listening to music, obsessively, the same way I read books – trying to decode its mysteries and secrets, trying to work out why it makes me feel the way it does, trying to make sense of its sounds and melodies. Likewise with films, the way meaning and shots work together, how the disparate elements add to form the total (or not), how a film is made; how it all works.

July 2007, and I was meant to be writing an essay at school in study hall when I found out about Across The Universe, and… well, one thing led to another, and I found a trailer for it and fell in love with it – its colours, music, visuals, scope, diversity, sprawl. When it opened in Australia in November, I asked my two best friends if they’d like to see it with me, knowing they were huge Beatles fans, and so we went, and ‘everything changed’ that day, or so they say. From the film’s opening shot – a slow zoom in to Jude sitting on an empty windswept beach, as the waves fell upon the screen, intercut with archival images of protests and violence and revolutions; as the all frenetic agitated guitar of ‘Helter Skelter’ cut across it all, I remember thinking ‘so this is what it’s all about.’ The ‘it’ in question was the Beatles – their music, their lyrics, personas; their magic, their mystery, the phenomenon; their legacy. The film picked you up on “a wave of terrific Beatles songs” and catapulted you head-first through the decade of the Sixties – from the youthful innocence of the early days, to the experimentation and exuberance of the psychedelic era, to the violence and protests of Vietnam, to its ambiguous end. Two hours later, as the final strains of ‘All You Need Is Love’ faded over a girl standing on a rooftop, smiling amongst her tears, ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ played and the credits rolled, it was hard not to sing along. There was one point, I think, when the three of us were singing along, and we left the cinema grinning like maniacs, bouncing on the tide of energy and music that was the film.

‘Do you have any of the Beatles’ music?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I replied, immediately ashamed of the fact.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’re about to remedy that.’

Things I’ve learnt at university (an un-definitive list).

If you’d asked me a year ago why I was adding an Honours year to my degree, I would’ve said it was to prolong – delay, even – the having to make a choice about what I wanted to do, delay the having to ‘get a real job’ thing and all the stuff that accompanies not being a student, like bank fees, and ridiculously priced everything.

Initially I didn’t want to do Honours (why would you voluntarily add another one to two years onto your degree?) for the simple reason that it involved writing a thesis of twelve to fifteen thousand words, something which scared me stupid. (It was only once my supervisor told me to cut bits out that I realised I’d written more than I thought I would, more than I had ever written before. Now, I know I can at least write something in the vicinity of sixteen-thousand two-hundred words all told, and I’m still not sure if it’s what I set out to write.) After I’d actually figured out how the hell you actually ‘do’ Honours – how to get the balance of researching, processing your research, writing ideas, and meeting with your supervisor every three to four weeks right – I realised that, as strange as it sounds, I actually liked the researching bit, the finding of as much stuff as you possibly can and digesting it all, seeing what comes out, what connections and ideas you can come up with, the hitherto unnoticed patterns that may become apparent. If there’s one thing I know I am going to miss about university, it’s the library and all the journals and databases you’re given access to.