Coronavirus in Ballarat: Composer locked down in London

That's where Ballarat composer and musician Rae Howell has found herself, but she said she's been able to keep busy with several innovative projects and commissions, even as the restrictions get worse there.

One of them is for the City of Ballarat's 1300 ROAR, a creative response to the pandemic - council set up a special phone line for people to leave a three minute phone message, about whatever they liked.

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The responses were collated, anonymised, and scrambled, then included in Ms Howell's new original composition, which she created with collaborators in Ballarat online.

The music is set to premiere later this week, but Ms Howell said it was an "emotional" process.

"For me, it's given me a bit more of a connection to home, because I can't be there, and it's weird not being home," she said from her lounge room in London.

"Feeling the connection and thinking about Ballarat, thinking about these people leaving voicemails - that's cool.

"It was the tone of a lot of the voicemails that did influence the piece, but I suppose the tone was also brought about by my feelings of what's going on.

"If I experience something, I'll write music and express that in musical terms - for this, because COVID and the lockdown has been emotional for everyone, no one can do what they want to do with freedom.

"In Ballarat, you've got freedom now, and I don't."

It's a contrast to her most recently completed project, the APRA/AMCOS Art Music Award-nominated Bee-Sharp Honeybee, composed for Natimuk's Nati Frinj Biennale.

"It was an absolutely fascinating project based on bees, and the sound of the bees," she explained.

"It was three years in the making, working with lots of musicians, artists, animators, and filmmakers, which culminated in a work for string orchestra with a live beehive and projected visuals - then it was performed outdoors, with projections on the wheat silos, which are huge."

This year has been more challenging, she said - flights have been cancelled, and finding a place to live and ride out London's second lockdown has been tricky, but Ms Howell acknowledged it's been "a challenging time for any musician, live performer, or artist".

"They are the industries that I would say have lost the most, and will be the last ones to regain the momentum, if they had the momentum before," she said.

"I suppose they're also people that are most adaptable to change, and we are resilient, we can work through, you have to think creatively about it.

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"I'm okay - I've found my feet, I've had to learn to adapt, but now the government's made it really difficult to get back, but there's nothing I can do about it, there's no point me wallowing in self-pity, and I don't really want to spend $10,000 getting back - that's a lot of money for an artist, it's just not plausible.

"I think musicians and artists are the resilient ones in the community because we're used to the ebb and the flow - it's just that in a time like this, there's a whole lot of ebb."

Keep an eye out for the premiere of Ms Howell's composition, In so many words.., later this week.

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