Married To The Job

Young composer and clarinettist Richard Haynes talks with

Richard Watts about the great love of his life.

Aged only 22, composer and clarinet player Richard Haynes has already won numerous accolades, including Symphony Australia’s 2003 Young Performer of the Year award. He has performed as a soloist with symphony orchestras in Victoria, Tasmania and Queensland, and has seen his original compositions performed by ensembles and soloists in Australia, China, Germany and Italy. He’s young, gay, successful and good-looking. So why is he still single?

"I’ve chosen a particularly difficult career path within the classical music world, so I really must travel as much as possible and make as many connections as possible with other performers and composers and organisations," Haynes explains.

The past few years have seen him performing and studying in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and France in order to further his career. Consequently he says he has abandoned the idea of finding a boyfriend at present.

"In terms of relationships it’s very hard to maintain anything, and to be honest I haven’t really tried. I think I owe it to myself to cultivate what it is I’m doing artistically because, you know, I have the rest of my life to think about relationships. That’s my duty to the art basically. I’m really putting myself out, as you can see," he laughs.

Haynes is one of several young musicians who will be performing in Chamber Music Australia’s At The Edge Of Sunset Series: Contemporary Chamber Music From Australia, a week of concerts at Federation Square’s BMW Edge during the Melbourne International Arts Festival.

While his own works will not be featured, Haynes says he is delighted to be playing at the Melbourne Festival, and believes that his own compositional skills will benefit his performance.

"As a composer I can approach the music that I play from a composer’s point of view, and I think that has contributed to the fact that I happen to be a successful performer. I think I really understand what it takes to put across the idea in a piece to an audience," he explains.

Traditional audiences for chamber music events tend towards the older and the conservative, but Haynes hopes to see a younger audience attracted to this series of concerts, which have specifically been programmed by Chamber Music Australia to help counter the form’s sometimes stuffy reputation.

"Chamber music doesn’t seem like the coolest thing in the world, however it really is very cool. It’s contemporary music, it’s music that’s coming out of composers who are our generation," he enthuses, before going on to compare his own music and that of his peers to modern art.

"You know you’re going to encounter really unfamiliar and really challenging work in a modern art gallery, and you can chose to interpret it how you want. It’s the same with contemporary music. You don’t have to have an interpretation forced upon you; it doesn’t have a very broad or long historical cannon behind it, so you can really appreciate its art on your own terms."

On the Edge of Sunset Series at the BMW Edge, Federation Square, Mon 10 - Sat 15 October at 6pm. Bookings through Ticketmaster: 1300 136 166.

This article originally apeared in MCV #249, Fri 7 Oct 2005.