✨Millennium Canticles
Friday 15 May 2026, 7PM
Abbotsford Convent
Join Kaylie Melville this Friday at @lifeatanam , where she will direct ANAM’s percussionists in Missy Mazzoli’s Millennium Canticles — a post-apocalyptic song cycle that reimagines ritual in a fractured world.
Written in 2022 for the Chicago ensemble Third Coast Percussion, the work blends ancient chant with mechanical rhythm and flashes of dark humour. Its five movements follow a community of imagined survivors rebuilding belief through sound — part prayer, part invention.
Under Kaylie’s direction, ANAM’s percussionists bring this strange, compelling world to life, revealing Mazzoli’s vision of renewal through rhythm, precision and play.
Program:
Jeanette LITTLE Shifting Worlds
Missy MAZZOLI Millennium Canticles
Thomas MEADOWCROFT Home Organs
Christopher CERRONE Ode to Joy
✍️ Field Notes: Artistic Director Kaylie Melville shares some outtakes from Speak’s tour at the Canberra International Music Festival.
“We’ve had a brilliant and busy week in Canberra! Today while Aaron, Eugene and Rohan were presenting Digital Echoes to a delighted audience, I was busy at Parliament House getting our lovely team of local musicians ready for tomorrow’s Bell Curve performance.
It’s a beautiful time of year to be visiting the city, with clear skies and the trees in their finest autumnal colours.
Along the way we’ve found some moments to enjoy some local sights. In this photo set you’ll spot a late night visit to Lindy Lee’s sparking sculpture Ouroboros, our new favourite Canadian restaurant Caribou, and our feathered neighbours (who deliver a wake up call you definitely won’t miss!).”
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✨Digital Echoes
Saturday 2 May 2026, 10AM
National Film and Sound Archive
✨Bell Curve
Sunday 3 May 2026, 11AM
Australian Parliament House
@the_cimf@kayliemelville
Tomorrow is the final day of our major exhibition ‘Silent Hand Catches Silver Bell’.
Encounter custom-built instruments, striking installations and archival materials that reveal the scale and audacity of Speak Percussion’s avante garde, boundary pushing practice.
Visit Saturday 2 May, 11am to 2pm.
Digital Echoes and Bell Curve are on their way to Eugene's second Canberra International Music Festival. Aaron Wyatt's Digital Echoes will feature in MOSSO, a mini-festival showcasing contemporary music at the National Film and Sound Archive. A day later, twelve bellringers will take over Parliament House for an extra special presentation of Bell Curve.
✨Digital Echoes
Saturday 2 May 2026, 10AM
National Film and Sound Archive
✨Bell Curve
Sunday 3 May 2026, 11AM
Australian Parliament House
Image description:
1: Two musicians play on a dark stage. To the left Aaron Wyatt plays viola, on his right Eugene Ughetti strikes a cymbal.
2: In a large dark room, various young Bell players hold the federation handbells, lit by spotlights.
Image 1: Darren Gill
Image 2: Bryony Jackson
@the_cimf
Join us tomorrow for a cup of tea, a biscuit, and new ideas for Test Flight #1.
Test Flight
📆 18 April
🕑 Session 1: 11:00-12:50 // Session 2: 13:30-15:15
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
The facilitators for Test Flight #1 are:
Hadley Agrez CEO & Program Director, Melbourne International Jazz Festival
Tamara Saulwick Artistic Director, Chamber Made
Kaylie Melville Artistic Director, Speak Percussion
The artists for Test Flight #1 are:
Reuben Lewis (with Tony Yap), Erica Bramham, Benjamin Anderson (with Kate Milligan), Margot Morales (with Peta Coy), Moses Mohammed, and John Cheong-Holdaway (with Jeremy Dullard & Adelista Widjaya).
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing Moses Mohammed, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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Moses enjoys an eclectic practice, participating across a mix of disciplines, genres, and arts communities. His compositions respond to everyday curiosities and affections, with particular interests at the moment in endemic Australian wildlife and notions of “the ordinary.”
Moses favours playful, process-driven, and collaborative approaches to music making, allowing each project’s compositional logic to emerge through his engagement with the materials, spaces, and people involved.
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing John Cheong-Holdaway, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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John Cheong-Holdaway is a creative producer, musician and composer based in Naarm/Melbourne. John is the Creative Producer and a musician with Balinese gamelan orchestra Gamelan DanAnda, is the manager and guitarist in kids punk band Riot Baby, plays kacapi in Sundanese kacapi suling quartet Sekar Kidul, bass in dangdut band Yarra Irama, composes his own electronic music, and has released a wide range of other music in genres from alt-pop to experimental noise.
Anglayang by Gamelan DanAnda x Firetail was PBS Album of the Week on its release in early 2025, and Listen to Your Mum by Riot Baby was nominated for APRA Song of the Year at the Major Minor Music Awards in 2023.
John is a regular performer and creator of works that appear at major festivals around Australia including OzAsia Festival, Asia TOPA, the National Folk Festival, Brunswick Music Festival and many more.
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing Margot Morales, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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Margot Morales is an artist working across performance, theatre, music, and dance. Their experimental solo work IN THE LIKELY EVENT OF FOREVER, won the 2023 Green Room Award for Best Writing in Cabaret and Headroom Award from RISING. Their queer digital adaptation of Eros and Psyche, PSYCHE404ERROR, won Best Work in Festival at Melbourne Fringe 2021 and was nominated for a Green Room Award in Experimental Practice.
As a collaborator, Margot has performed in APHIDS' EATING OUT, Andy Butler’s LIVING TRUTHFULLY IN INVENTED CIRCUMSTANCES (ACCA), and Ari Angkasa's live film works MEDIUM at Abbotsford Convent and SUSPICIOUS FISH for Long Prawn/Melbourne Fringe at Fed Square.
As a musical comedian, her show VANITY FAIR ENOUGH was nominated for the Golden Gibbo at the 2019 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. She has performed her original songs at the Enmore Theatre, Forum Theatre, and with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing Benjamin Anderson, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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Benjamin Anderson (he/him) is a bass trombonist based in Melbourne (Naarm). His approach to music is grounded in curiosity, whether he is playing in his role as Principal Bass Trombonist with Orchestra Victoria, as co-founder of Melbourne-based new music ensemble Ossicle Duo, or as a solo artist and practitioner of exploratory art music.
Collaborative at heart, he has developed new works with various Australian and International composers including James Hullick, Liam Flenady, James Gardner, Jaslyn Robertson, and Travers K. Eira.
Benjamin is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne, researching performer-composer collaboration through an embodied cognitive science lens.
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing Erica Bramham, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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Erica Bramham is a Melbourne-based composer, vocalist, and double bassist whose work begins with text — using poetry as the foundation for melody, rhythm, and sound design. Her interdisciplinary practice draws on modal composition, improvisation, movement, and performance art, creating work that moves between the lyrical and the experimental.
A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, she has released three albums and an EP since 2016. Her work has been praised by The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and All About Jazz, and she was nominated for the 2021 Music Victoria Awards (Best Folk Act).
Test Flight
📆 18 April, 11.00 a.m. - 4.00 p.m
📍 Darebin Arts Centre
Introducing Reuben Lewis, one of the artists for the inaugral Test Flight. Test Flight is a new platform for hybrid practice in music and contemporary performance, created by Speak Percussion and Chamber Made. This opportunity is for artists to share work at its early stage of development, and get feedback from industry and peers. Test Flight is a low stress, light touch, supportive context for artists at all stages of practice.
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Reuben Lewis is an artist investigating the intersection of electro-acoustic sound design and physical performance. Over a fifteen-year career, he has developed a singular musical language described by The Australian as “beyond category” and by The Wire as “a vivid listening experience that gleams with sinister detail.” Devised through trumpet alongside live processing with pedals and laptop, his music aims to play on expectations and unravel all semblance of familiar form.
Central to his work is PhD research into the creative possibilities of trance. This is rooted in a decade-long collaboration with dancer Tony Yap, through which Lewis is developing modular systems for trance principles within sound design. An APRA Art Music Award winner and ARIA nominee, Lewis has been commissioned by festivals and organisations including Mona Foma, Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Musica Viva, and the Melbourne Festival. His practice is further informed by professional roles with MESS, Dancehouse, and the Australian Art Orchestra.
