Astra Season 2025
Passages through the music of the times.
Eleven concerts of choral and chamber music, interdisciplinary collaborations, electronic landscapes and improvisation—where past narratives meet radical experimentation and poetic reflection.
We Called it New Music
8-11pm, Friday April 11
3-11pm, Saturday April 12
Lithuanian House, North Melbourne
We Called It New Music is a two-day performance event reflecting on the radical legacy of the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC), a groundbreaking artist-run space active from 1976–1983.
Clifton Hill Community Music Centre redefined experimental practice in Australia, dissolving boundaries between music, film, performance, and installation. It was a space where musicians made films, visual artists composed music, and critics took the stage—fostering an interdisciplinary ethos that continues to resonate today.
Founded by Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt, Clifton Hill Community Music Centre operated on a unique model: free entry, no artist fees, and total creative freedom. It became a hub for artists pushing against the cultural mainstream, where postmodernism and countercultural aesthetics collided in the raw industrial setting of a former organ factory.
We Called It New Music brings together original Clifton Hill Community Music Centre artists alongside contemporary musicians responding to its enduring influence.
Join us over two days of performances that trace the past, present, and future of sound on the radical edges.
Curated by David Chesworth and Liquid Architecture
Supported by Creative Victoria
“In us are all passions
and all vices”
5pm, Sunday May 11
St. Mark’s Anglican Church, Fitzroy
Music amid disorder, cruelty and obliteration: a polyphonic Passion from the heart of the 30 Years War is joined by a graphic Mass after the military coup in Chile, and a choral-poetic cycle from the French Resistance in the last winter of World War 2.
Christoph Demantius, León Schidlowsky, Francis Poulenc, Philippe Hersant, Jean Ockeghem, Nuevo canción chileno (Violeta Parra, Victor Jara, Sergio Ortega)
The Astra Choir and soloists
John McCaughey conductor
with Helen Ayres violin, Timothy Phillips percussion,
Niels Bijl & Jason Xanthoudakis saxophones, Linda Kent organ
Commas and
8pm, Friday July 25
Hall of St Mary’s, North Melbourne
Andrew Byrne, 27 Premieres (2019-24):
Since returning to Australia in 2019, Andrew Byrne has taken his music in new directions. Recent pieces explore systems—cellular automata, spirals, tilings, and canons—where mathematical rigour meets the spark of creativity. This concert premieres a selection of his latest works
FORTY-EIGHT: FALLING & RISING, GLINTS, COMMAS,
TILING CANONS, SPIRAL STUDY
with canons by JS Bach.
Ensemble of winds, keyboard, percussion
Twisted Runways - sound in motion through improvisation, radical compositions, and creative exchanges
Supported by Creative Australia
The Joan Events No. 1
8pm, Friday August 8
Hall of St Mary’s, North Melbourne
This concert launches the JOAN EVENTS, a multi-year project of new impulses in performance and composition, supported by the Joan Pollock Creative Fund. The fund is a gift from prominent Melbourne musician and teacher Joan Pollock, and continues her decades of contributions to Astra, as solo pianist, guest conductor, and founder/director of the Astra Improvising Choir.
Creative exchanges, improvisations
with Ruth Crawford, STUDY IN MIXED ACCENTS (1930)
Helen Gifford, OBSESSION for Joan Pollock (2005)
Kim Bastin, piano; Elizabeth Drake, piano; Jessica Aszodi, voice; Jaslyn Robertson, synths, Chloë Sobek, violone & electronics, Iran Sanadzadeh, pressure-sensitive floors
Twisted Runways - sound in motion through improvisation, radical compositions, and creative exchanges
Supported by the Joan Pollock Creative Fund and Creative Australia
Automated Intelligence
8pm, Saturday August 30
Church of All Nations, Carlton
CREATURE PATTERNS
movement, electronics, video-improvisation, drummers
Patterns—human and machine-generated—explore connections between systems, technology, and music-making. In algorithmic structures and through live interaction these new works reshape the experience of performance.
Andrew Byrne’s ANTS with dancers and percussionists
James Hullick’s DISRUPTIVE CRITTERS with live video and recorded vocal sounds
Musical intelligence' has its place among the multiple kinds of intelligence identified in the late 20th century. Musical sound can also take in other forms of thinking, as explored in this pair of concerts. The automated processes of this program are followed on September 6 by the particular intelligence of poems, entering into choral sound
Supported by City of Melbourne and Creative Australia
Poetic Intelligence
8pm, Saturday September 6
Church of All Nations, Carlton
POETRY INTO MULTIPLE VOICES
Premiering two vocal-poetic cycles for choir and solo voices:
Andrée Greenwell THREE PIECES (2021) (Felicity Plunkett, Rilke, Ross Gibson), David Howell INTO THE NIGHT BEFORE THE SUN SONGS OF TRAVEL (2022) (Dan Christie)
with choruses of
Keith Humble (Wen Ting-Yung), György Ligeti (Hölderlin), Graham Hair (Alan Gould), Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Wallace Stevens), Helen Gifford (Akhmatova, Kathleen Raine, Elizabeth Riddell), Rainer Linz (John Jenkins, Ted Hopkins, Paul Greene), Carl Vine (Thomas Campion), Philippe Hersant (diverse poets)
The Astra Choir and Soloists
John McCaughey, conductor
‘Supported by the City of Melbourne and Creative Australia
“Water is the product of burning”
8pm, Friday October 3
Hall of St Mary’s, North Melbourne
A new work after Balzac by Neil Kelly (2025)
Balzac’s Gambara (1837) follows a demented composer, his long suffering wife Marianna, and their scheming patron, Count Marcosini. This performance, a prototype for a larger theater/dance work, explores the novella’s vision of ‘music’—from ‘the sublime chorus of angels’ to a ‘hideous cacophony’—played on piano and a panharmonicon, a proto-synthesiser.
Michael Kieran Harvey, piano
Michael Hewes, audio processing
Twisted Runways - sound in motion through improvisation, radical compositions, and creative exchanges
Supported by Creative Australia
Cabinet of Curiosities
3pm, Sunday October 26
Hall at St Mary's, North Melbourne
Intimate communication and thoughts experienced in real time entered performance culture simultaneously in the England of Shakespeare's monologues and the Italy of baroque vocal composition.
This concert places the worlds of the fearless Abbess Cozzolani of Milan and the opera celebrity and English immigrant Handel among more recent British experimental performance pieces, and a new ensemble communication by Melbourne composer Charlie Sdraulig.
Behind the cathedral: Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, CONCERTATO PIECES (1642),
In the ducal chapel: George Frideric Handel, CHANDOS ANTHEM, "As Pants the Hart" (1719),
In art rooms: Laurence Crane, COME BACK TO THE OLD SPECIMEN CABINET, JOHN VIGANI (2007),
John White, DRINKING AND HOOTING MACHINE (1968)
Charlie Sdraulig New work (2025), solo voices, choir and live electronics
The Astra Choir and Soloists
John McCaughey, conductor
Continuing Curiosities
October / November
3 Performance Laboratories at
JOLTED Performance Space, Northcote
In partnership with Jolt Arts, and with support from Creative Australia
MORE DETAILS TO COME.
Patterns of Plants
in Tasmania
November 25, Hobart Town Hall
November 26, Princess Theatre Launceston
November 27, Burnie Arts Centre
Mamoru Fujieda’s PATTERNS OF PLANTS
New arrangements of Patterns of Plants by Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda (2024, commissioned by Astra) for a 7-piece ensemble of traditional Japanese and Western Baroque instruments are presented for the first time in Tasmania as part of Van Diemen’s Lunchbox Series.
Astra Ensemble: Miyama McQueen-Tokita & Brandon Lee, kotos; Henry Liang, sho; Laura Vaughan, gamba; Julia Fredersdorff, Baroque violin; Ryan William, recorders; Alexander Ritter, countertenor
in partnership with Van Diemen’s Band and with support from Creative Australia
Cosmic and Terrestrial Dialogues
5 pm, Sunday December 14
St Mark's Anglican Church, Fitzroy
Choral music shows its unique attributes in expressions beyond the immediate moment, and conversations across great distances in time and space.
Antoine Brumel, Livia Teodorescu, Gianandrea Pauletta, Giovanna Dongu, George Balint, Dan Dediu, Max Reger
The Astra Choir and Soloists,
John McCaughey, conductor
with string quintet and Linda Kent, organ