In 2021, I was approached by Paul Kildea from Musica Viva Australia to write a piece for Garrick Ohlsson for his 2023 Australian tour. He would be playing music by Franz Liszt, Samuel Barber, Franz Schubert, Alexander Scriabin, and the music of Frédéric Chopin (of which Garrick is a historically notable interpreter). While researching and reflecting on how my creative voice could complement both the program and Garrick’s unique pianism, I stumbled on a description of Garrick’s playing saying that he possesses a “calmly demanding presence”.

My starting point was testing the idea of channeling a piece by a romantic giant, Franz Liszt, which evokes the same descriptors for me, Sposalisio (meaning marriage) from Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage) which was inspired by Raphael’s high-renaissance painting, Sposalisio. Though this piece bears similar motivic and structural scaffolding to the Liszt, there was a great deal of stylistic tension in its infusion into Convocations.

The word convocation means “to call together a group of people assembled for ecclesiastical or academic purposes”. Convocations, therefore, can assemble unlikely, often separated groups of people for intellectual or spiritual pursuits. This project took on the word’s spiritual significance in the soundworld created to capture Garrick’s essence, and the word’s intellectual connotation in how one can organically catalyse music from the unlikely ingredients of an American concert pianist who specialises in the romantic giants and a Tasmanian composer ravenous in the pursuit of the contemporary. Thus, this piece and project became not just a convocation but its plural, Convocations.