Celeste Oram (born 1990)
Celeste Oram grew up in Aotearoa, New Zealand. She is a graduate of the University of Auckland and recently earned a PhD in music composition from the University of California San Diego. Her dissertation — entitled “The Way We Look to a Song: Five Compositions and the Envoicing of Musical Inheritance” — can be found on her website. She now lives in New York City.
Celeste Oram has several ongoing projects, including collaborations “to address legacies of settler-colonial cultures of music and listening” and an exploration of the life of New Zealander Vera Wyse Munro (1897-1966), “a pioneering amateur radio operator and experimental violinist, including the reconstruction of her early-20thC radio equipment and the re-enactment of her telematic musical broadcasts.”
Celeste Oram’s website states:
Celeste’s works are scenarios in which music-making is the catalyst for exploring sonic & social histories, and improvisation … [e]ncompassing instrumental writing, song & speech, electronics, visual media, theatre, and improvisation.
The title of Celeste Oram’s surrealist 2017 composition The Young People’s Guide to the Orchestra alludes to Benjamin Britten’s famous The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, which itself is based a theme by Henry Purcell, and she quotes from Britten’s work as well as other compositions.
But that’s not the strangest aspect of this music. Celeste Oram composed the work “for the NZSO [New Zealand Symphony Orchestra] National Youth Orchestra and 73 battery-powered FM radios.” It soon becomes evident that at least some of these radios are playing prerecorded material, such as the reference to music “performed by the Orchestra of the Age of the Anthropocene conducted by a reconstructed genetic clone of Leonard Bernstein.”
Take note of the early discussion on the radio of the story behind Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony, for that’s a key to what happens towards the end.
Following the unconventional conclusion of this composition, Celeste Oram appears onstage.
Her 2019 composition a loose affiliation of alleluias is subtitled “concerto for improvising violin and three voices” (of which the composer is one) and, of course, an orchestra:
A page on Celeste Oram’s website provides much more information about the composition, including identifying the “Three Teen Angels” as “Sibyls of the San Fernando Valley. or, the d’Aranyi sisters. or, a popstar supergroup of Joan of Arc, Malala Yousafzai, and Greta Thunberg.”