Find Your Voice Collective and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performing at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, Photographs by Mark Gambino
The MSO took a departure from the classical world for Sonder, a collaboration with the Find Your Voice Collective at Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s annual free concert series has been bringing music to the people in an open-air setting for close to 100 years. While these performances usually focus on classical music, occasionally they will venture into other realms, such as 2022’s One Song with the late Uncle Archie Roach, and 2023’s Mosaics, celebrating Melbourne’s cultural diversity.
The MSO’s latest departure from the classical world is Sonder, a collaboration with the Find Your Voice Collective. The show’s name refers to “the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own,” a beautiful concept and a fitting title for a performance showcasing songwriters and artists who identify with a disability.
Swapping their customary attire for matching FYVC shirts, the MSO took a back seat during the performance, playing a supporting role to the Warrnambool-based all abilities juggernaut.
Hip hop artist Grace “GK” Kenny was an explosive presence as she performed her aptly titled single “Dynamite,” while “Looking For Lucy” and “Dad’s Guitar” were among many touching moments, written and performed by Bruce Cameron and Dean Saunders respectively.
The featured artists had creative control of their work, from the songwriting process through to the final performance; the subject matter of the songs was deeply personal yet here they were at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, performing to thousands of people on a beautiful summer evening.
Behind the featured artists, FYVC’s 150+ strong choir proved to be a living, breathing instrument that delighted throughout. The choir’s powerful sound and stage presence was utilised brilliantly during “Ripple,” where percussive, onomatopoeiac vocal flourishes and synchronised movements added a wonderful musical and visual texture to Jacob Rudman-Reeves’ spellbinding dance performance.
The evening culminated in the anthemic “We are the Ones” featuring Jacob Paton-Lee, whose moves and vocals made Mick Jagger and Axl Rose look like shrinking violets.
The MSO may have slipped into the shadows during Sonder, but they were also the backbone of the show. The orchestra combined with the FYVC choir to create a lush and beautiful sound that matched the sense of triumph underpinning the whole show, 12 months in the making.
Sonder was the FYVC’s most ambitious project to date, but the music was only part of the vision. In a period that has seen funding cuts and uncertainty around the NDIS, Sonder was not just a musical performance but an illustration of why organisations such as the Find Your Voice Collective are so vital in Australia’s cultural landscape. (As an aside, Reclink Australia and Wild at Heart Records are just two of many other organisations doing similar work.)
FYVC aims to break down walls and barriers through building community and amplifying a diversity of voices; “the full spectrum of humanity” as it was phrased during the evening’s introductions. In an anxious and divided moment in history, Sonder was a celebration of humanity and its multitudinous voices and stories, at once powerful, meaningful and truly joyous.
MSO and the Find Your Voice Collective performed at Sidney Myer Music Bowl, on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, on Friday 13 February.
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