Townsville Civic Theatre
August 6, 2015

At its most rudimentary level, music – like all sound – is a simple matter of physics and biology: a wave of gaseous molecules ricocheting across a space, find their way to our ears which then funnel signals to our brain. Of course that’s far from the end of the story. Somewhere in the unfathomable complexity of our cerebral circuitry, our minds transform these mere perceptions of noises through the ineffable prism of our emotions, but perhaps what’s even more extraordinary is how music can specifically target a particular sentiment in a way that is unanimously implicit. The hope and optimism of a major key; the sprightly energy of an allegro; the sorrow and pain of minor tonalities; the unsettling anger of dissonance and the satisfying relief of a harmonic resolution. Perhaps more than any other artistic expression, music is capable of communicating with unparalleled immediacy the visceral spectrum of human feeling in a way that is, somehow, universally understood. Whether or not Artistic Director Piers Lane was conscious of it, his programme of Mozartian classicism and Russian romanticism offered a fascinating study of music’s ability to conjure...