Muses Trio + Eve Klein: Storms, Spirits, and Salty Tails

A playful suite for a spirited pooch by Tilly Jones, the release and renewal of a Brisbane summer storm depicted in Abigail Liu’s Storm Song, preceded by poetry by Emily Winter, before Muses Trio join genre-defying composer and songstress Eve Klein in an extraordinary new performance of Ghost Ships: Six Songs of the Sea. Shark attack, mutiny, ghostly drinking parties and piracy with an Australian twist feature in this haunting performance. Blending cabaret, classical, and blues, this vivid contemporary song cycle will have you weeping, laughing and singing along.

Program 

Tilly Jones – Tarantella for Stella (2025)

I have had the pleasure of knowing Vicki Brooke for several years and was delighted when she commissioned me to compose a piece for her 80th Birthday. Vicki is a strong, generous, and vivacious woman who carries a deep passion and determined support for the arts and environmental causes. As such, I wanted to emulate these characteristics within this short suite, named for her dear pooch, Stella.

The opening section is an ode to the beautiful natural surroundings of Vicki’s Gretel Farm, an improvised soundscape including the violin imitating the sound of a whip bird. The second half of the first movement features a light march theme, interspersed with uncertain hope, and at times a sense of instability before it returns in cheeky optimism.

The second movement is a short, but light and jovial piece with a simple form. This piece should be played with a playful energy, and a sense of child-like wonder. Think of entering Narnia for the first time, or dancing amongst the flowers in the garden! The very short transition into the last movement should be made to be quite dramatic, but also fun – alluding to the joy and mischief that often accompanies the arrival of a treasured pet into one’s life, in this case the wonderful Stella! 

The finale movement is a Tarantella for Stella, and really encompasses the joy, entertainment, and companionship that Stella brought to Vicki. The piece opens with a dramatic chord, before going into a moderate iteration of the theme, alluding to the quieter moments with Stella. This is thenfollowed by the vigour and cheekiness of the rest of the piece – imagine trying to catch Stella as she playfully runs away!  Tilly Jones (NSW, 2025).

Abigail Liu - Storm Song for Cello and Piano (2024)

Storm Song was inspired by Australian author Megan Jacobson's novel The Build-Up
Season. This work for cello and piano explores feelings of release and renewal through the
imagery of a brewing summer storm, and my own experience of Queensland summers -
afternoons where the air is thick with heat, bright with sunlight, and heavy with the smell
of oncoming rain. The excerpt from Jacobson's novel that informed this work is included
below.

The air is fat to bursting with humidity, and in the distance lightning is crackling. If I
close my eyes I can still see the flash through my lids.
“Mum knew I couldn’t fix her, hey,” he says, finally, the clouds rumbling in the
darkness above us. His voice is colourless. “She knew. But she let me try, because she knew that I had to.”
I keep hold of his hand.
The ions charge and bounce around us, making everything active. The air tastes
coppery and it wants to split open. The wind whips, pulling at our clothes, jerking our hair,
and the trees are going wild. We stand there, facing the elements together.
And then it happens. The clouds just give up. Water crashes down and everything
becomes looser. It’s the first rain to herald the coming wet season and it’s not cold, but it
soaks us, and it hides Max’s tears.

Megan Jacobson, The Build-Up Season (Melbourne: Penguin Random House Australia 2017), 262-3.

Eve Klein – Ghost Ships: Six Songs of the Sea (2024, world premiere performance)

Ghost Ships is a song cycle for contralto (or mezzo-soprano) and piano trio featuring extended techniques and optional amplification. The work playfully reshapes seafaring songs to explore themes of Australian migration and postcolonialism. The composer Eve Klein recounts:
"I grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches—an expanse of light cadmium yellow sand looking out to an endless ocean. We would catch fish by the sewage processing plant at Clontarf, and go crabbing underneath the deck of the Manly Swim Club, racing the incoming tide to get off the rocks safely.

Scary stories of the sea were ever-present in schoolyard whispers and the ocean was also painted as a dangerous place where ships were lost, people drowned and little children eaten by monsters from the deep. This was made more real by my family history. In 1949, my mother arrived in Australia from Malta at four years old, an overwhelming journey undertaken following tragedy: the loss of six children and their home in World War II bombings. My grandfather Karmenu was a frogman in the Royal Navy, removing landmines from ships in the Mediterranean Sea during the Second World War. After surviving this perilous work he arrived to find his home devastated, and the need to rebuild his family which was only held together in his absence by the will of my grandmother Josephine. My father would take me fishing late into the night and tell stories of his childhood friend who was mauled to death in a shark attack on a local beach when he was twelve, a beach I grew up playing on. The sea loomed large in my childhood imaginings, and the (sometimes) pleasurable horrors of our family stories intermingled with British folk songs and Disney pirate adventures to form vivid vignettes of the sea twisted through the lens of European Colonialism and Australian migrant experiences. Ghost Ships captures these vignettes, using the lens of seafaring songs to tease out the sense of unearthly diaspora I felt growing up as a second-generation Maltese Australian on Sydney's Northern Beaches".

Ghost Ships was composed for Muses Trio, a Queensland-based, all-female ensemble that celebrates music composed by women. Consequently, the song cycle champions women's perspectives and puts a feminist spin on sea song tropes, which typically privilege masculine viewpoints due to their historical association with seafaring occupations. This theme plays out in Ghost Ships' structure, which begins by reconjuring two prototypical song forms—a lament and a drinking song—and recasting them from female characters' perspectives. The next two songs incorporate the composer's personal history into the cycle. Nanna Josephine's Journey blends the blues with a Romantic-era ballad to tell Klein's grandmother's story of traveling to Australia by ship alone with her remaining children. Shark Attack! combines elements of sea shanties and children's songs to explore the macabre delight children take in hearing scary stories, and is based on Klein’s father's childhood experience. The final pair of songs delves into the lives of colonial women forcibly transported to Australia: Charlotte Badger and Mary Bryant. Lady Badger's Piratical Reel pushes the form of the reel to absurd lengths, highlighting the false portrayal of Charlotte Badger as Australia's first female pirate by writers over more than 200 years. The final song, Remembering Charlotte, reimagines the homecoming ballad as an elegy for Mary Bryant's daughter Charlotte Spence, who was born and died during Mary's journeys to and from Australia. Through this three-stage progression, Ghost Ships transforms traditional sea song tropes with a uniquely feminine and Australian perspective.

Artists

Muses Trio

Muses Trio are the performing artists of Muses Inc. and are some of Australia’s leading and most exciting musicians in contemporary classical music, known for their edgy, spine tingling and virtuosic performance style: Christa Powell (violin), Louise King (cello) and Therese Milanovic (piano). Muses Trio celebrate music composed by women, performed by women, and focus on bringing this relatively unknown, yet vastly deserving collection of works to the stage.

Discovering, inspiring, collaborating, commissioning, connecting and supporting creative women to pursue and share artistic excellence drives the passion and impetus of their artistic focus. They have released four independent albums: The Spirit and the Maiden, Celebrating Clara, Music for Calm and Catharsis, 10 Years, and also recorded for ABC Classic’s Women of Note Vol 3 and 4. In 2020, they received the ABC Fresh Start Fund to commission and record Fire Dances for ABC Classic, comprising of a short dance from a women composer in each Australian state and territory, reflecting on their experiences of the 2019-2020 devastating bushfire season. 2023 marked the tenth anniversary of their debut appearance. Highlights included their debut EP for Corella Recordings, The Road Not Taken, and releasing their ABC Classic FM feature album, 10 Years. musestrio.com
 

Eve Klein

Eve Klein’s compositions have been called vivid, revolutionary, inclusive, moving and must-see. Winner of the 2023 Art Music Award for Experimental Practice, Eve brings orchestral music into dialogue with immersive and interactive technologies for screen, art music and mass festival audiences. Eve's work has been experienced at Salisbury Cathedral, Burning Man, New York University, VIVID Sydney, MONA, GOMA, Brisbane Festival, World Science Festival, the Arts Centre Melbourne and the State Library of Queensland. As Lead Composer for Textile Audio, Eve crafted City Symphony, an interactive AR music experience overlaying Brisbane CBD). 

Eve creates artworks in collaboration with community groups, festivals, researchers, and NGOs to achieve community transformation goals. Recent projects have explored gendered and racial violence, climate change, disaster recovery and refugee rights. Eve's work, Vocal Womb, is an example of this practice, the premiere was called the "#1 coolest thing at MOFO 2018" (Timeout Melbourne). 
By day, Eve works as an Associate Professor of Music Technology, leading an interactive music and spatial audio research cluster at the University of Queensland. Most importantly, Eve is the proud mum of a six-year-old girl who loves playing AFL and violin. Eve lives and works in Brisbane, Australia on Turrbal and Jagera Country.