The Song Company: Dreamers of the Day

Dreamers of the Day - a fantastical musical adventure exploring an Inception-like series of nested dreams.
From ambiguous start to surprising finish, this program sets out to fragment and distort the listener’s experience of slowly waking from sleep, with the focus on changing perceptions of time – at times pulsing and pacy, at others hazy and elusive – with new arrangements of some iconic pieces of Classical music, culminating in a part-minimalist, part-improvisatory soundtrack of four pianos plus electronic and real percussion, a talking clock, and a twilight heroine on a kaleidoscopic ride through states of semi-consciousness, where the stretching of the harmonic rhythm of the final Contrapunctus from J.S.Bach’s Art of Fugue portrays the fluidity of psychological time against the primordial relentlessness of the clock and Time itself.

Program includes
Steve Reich Clapping Music
Stravinsky Otche Nash’
Handel (arr.) Zadok the Priest
J.S. Bach arr. W.Swingle Sleepers, awake!
J.S. Bach The Art of Fugue / Contrapunctus XIX
Antony Pitts Anna’s Rapid Eye Movement

About The Song Company
Since the dawn of history, the human voice and the act of singing have been intrinsically linked with storytelling and the acquisition of culture. The Song Company belongs to a land whose first peoples used songlines and vocal music to pass knowledge and culture from generation to generation, and is proud to continue that tradition, in a unique way, sharing music from across western and non-western art traditions. From its beginnings in 1984 the ensemble’s schedule has grown to include a mix of national and international touring, a subscription series in cities across Australia, recording and broadcast projects, education activities, and special collaborative projects.

The Song Company’s repertoire covers vocal music from the 10th century to contemporary works, and is unique in its stylistic diversity. The Company remains at the forefront of contemporary vocal music through an extensive commissioning program and collaborations with artists and composers of the highest calibre from around the world. A longstanding commitment to education sees the ensemble perform regularly in schools throughout the country, including bringing music workshops to children in regional and remote areas.

From 2016 the ensemble has been led by the British composer, conductor, producer, and lecturer Antony Pitts, whose award-winning career has taken him from the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court Palace and New College, Oxford, via the BBC, the Royal Academy of Music, and performances in Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Berlin Philharmonie, to the forefront of the Australian music scene as Artistic Director of The Song Company.