Jim Cotter @ Jan Hogan

For Saturday only (12.00 to 5.00), Jim Cotter, the renowned Composition lecturer at the ANU School of Music, will present the sound work “Piece for Merry-go-round” (1976), at the ANU School of Art Gallery, in conjunction with Jan Hogan’s exhibition Becoming.

The piece was written for the merry-go-round in Civic to obtain a moving audience for a 4 track work. The work eventually became “The Weird Night Music” for The Man from Mukinupin after Dorothy Hewitt “fell in love with the piece”.

Coincidentally much of the original construction of the work (on paper) was undertaken in Gundaroo. The final realisation of the score was made with the first digital synthesiser in the world – the “Quasar” which was an Australian invention of the engineer Tony Furse and at the time was on loan to Jim Cotter as part of an Australia Council Grant.

Jim says he was “so impressed by the exhibition that I congratulated Jan and mentioned toungue-in-cheek that the only thing that could have improved the showing would have been some music by me! Then Nigel called me to account in an email last night – so here we are…”