Excerpt 1: Johannes Brahms, Canon: Zu Rauch! (To Smoke)
“All must turn to smoke,
the earth’s bright mass,
and heaven’s azure too”

Excerpt 2: Improvising voices & Michael Hewes (computer-processing): Out Of Voice (1992)

From the concert at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Scienceworks, Spotswood on Saturday November 7, 1992.

Astra in association with the La Trobe University Music Department: with invented percussion, live electronics, voices.

Performers including: Michael Hewes, David Hirst, Graeme Leak, Jeff Pressing, the Astra Improvising Choir directed by Joan Pollock and the Astra Choir conducted by John McCaughey.

Click here for information about Scienceworks, Spotswood.

For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building. The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.