The Museum

Before its premiere in 2026, you are invited to experience a special preview of The Museum, a major new work by composer Steven Takasugi, created with Speak Percussion. This work-in-development showing offers a glimpse into Takasugi’s ambitious evening-length piece for three percussionists and electronics. Drawing on sound archives from Grainger Museum and Speak Percussion, and the collaborating artists’ personal collections, The Museum brings to light the quirky and the idiosyncratic fascinations of musicians: Percy Grainger, Speak Percussion and percussionists more generally.

Commissioned for Speak Percussion’s 25th anniversary and developed in partnership with the Grainger Museum, the project interweaves personal and institutional histories to question how we collect, preserve, and pass on stories. This preview performance offers audiences the rare chance to step inside the creative process of a boundary-pushing collaboration that will ultimately merge the cultures of the concert hall, museum, and gallery.

CREDITS

Steven Takasugi – composer
Eugene Ughetti – performer / collaborator
Kaylie Melville – performer / collaborator
Louise Devenish – performer / collaborator

BIOS:

Speak Percussion takes percussive art to its physical and conceptual extremes. We shape the sounds of 21st century Australian percussion music through the creation and presentation of ambitious arts projects. Internationally recognised as a leader in the fields of experimental and contemporary classical music, Speak redefines the potential of percussion.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi, born 1960 in Los Angeles, is a composer of electro-acoustic concert music. This involves the collecting and archiving of recorded, acoustic sound samples into large databases, each classifying thousands of individual, performed instances collected over decades of experimentation and research, mostly conducted in his private sound laboratory. These are then subject to computer-assisted, algorithmic composition, revised and adjusted until the resulting emergent sound phenomena, energies, and relationships reveal hidden meanings and bewildering contexts to the composer. Against this general project of fixed-media is the addition of live performers, described as an accompanying project: "When people return..." This relationship often creates a "strange doubling" playing off the "who is doing what?" inherent with simultaneous live and recorded media: a ventriloquism effect of sorts.

Image: Crushed music stands from The Museum (2024) Steven Kazuo Takasugi. Photo: Jebbah Baum

ACCESSIBILITY

Melba Hall is wheelchair accessible via a side entrance. To read more about access services available at our venues, please visit: https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/access-our-events.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION

• Please stay home if you feel unwell, even with mild symptoms. Face masks are welcome in all settings for community and personal safety.  

• In order to account for drop-off in attendance, we overbook a select number of free events at the Faculty. If you have not arrived by the start of the performance, your ticket may be released to any waiting patrons at the door. Please arrive at the venue at least 15 minutes before the performance to secure your seat.  

• Admission to any of our concerts and events is strictly at the discretion of Front of House. We have zero tolerance for any disrespectful behaviour.