MEET THE COMPOSERS

Christop Her Healey

Christopher Healey holds a Bachelor of Music (Composition), Honours (Class I) from the University of Queensland. He has studied with renowned Australian composers Gerard Brophy and Robert Davidson, as well as eminent American composer, Daron Hagen. Christopher’s music is eclectic in style, atmospheric and evocative, from the transfixingly tender to the disturbingly macabre. He weaves fantastical tapestries of enchanting textures, warm lyrical melodies with extended harmonies.

He has been commissioned and/or performed by Omega Ensemble, Flinders Quartet, Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, the BRON Saxophone Quartet, BoBBest of Brass, Ensemble Françaix, the Nickson Quartet and others. Christopher has also received prizes including the Alan Lane Award, A.G. Francis Prize, 2nd Place in the Arcadia Winds Composition Competition, 2nd Place in the ANZVS Composition Competition, and the Australian Postgraduate Award.

Vita Nostra: Our life (is brief)

This mercurial and exuberant piece was inspired in part by the dark fantasy novel of the same name by Ukrainian authors Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. The title of the book comes from the lyrics of the old Latin student anthem, ‘Vita Nostra brevis est, Brevi infiniteur’, which translates to ‘Our life is brief, it will shortly end’.

The book’s protagonist, Sasha, is made to undertake bizarre and dangerous tasks to unlock latent abilities. but her potential and reckless pursuit of her studies leads her teachers to attempt to control her through fear. There is a particularly philosophical moment where one of Sasha’s mentors (who appears to be God in some sense) explains that love cannot exist without fear. Despite the threats wielded against her by her instructors, Sasha repeatedly pushes past the boundaries she has been warned to remain within, each time with greater and more terrible consequences. As a result, Sasha makes both exhilarating discoveries and terrifying overreaches. At the close, unable to be controlled by fear, Sasha does something extraordinary; she creates a universe in which love can exist without fear.

The musical language used in Vita Nostra draws on both traditional and contemporary gestures, including those of the film music idiom, and structurally responds to Sasha’s story-arch. Full of character changes, from mysterious and macabre to buoyant and optimistic, Vita Nostra is bursting with drama and vitality, and unified by the recurring melodic material that appears throughout.