This past year has been hard on relationships. For 24-year-old cellist James Morley, a student at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne, it tested his relationship with music itself.
“[Under pandemic lockdown] there were periods where I just couldn’t really listen to music – or I was just listening to music that’s easy to switch off to,” he says. “I found too many thoughts going on in my brain. It was actually quite hard to give music that kind of attention and respect that you want to give, in normal times — really processing it and listening to it properly.
“A whole year where you don’t feel like you’re contributing very much, or you’re not learning the things that you thought you’re going to learn … can be a very, very kind of dark place.”
Cellist James Morley and composer Liza LimCredit:Jason South
But now he’s reinvigorated, in large part thanks to a huge new investment in Australian music by ANAM announced on Monday in which 67 composers will be paid $5000 each to create more than 6.5 hours of new Australian music for 67 musicians (including Morley), to support a sector ravaged by a year of almost no performances.
