Herald Sun

by Simon Plant
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THE cellist likes old-style rap and early jazz, the pianist is into indie rock and the flautist calls himself a classical music geek.

"Yeah, we're such different people," says "the geek", Tim Munro.

But if members of Chicago-based sextet eighth blackbird "fight and argue" over repertoire, they always know when something isn't working. As Munro puts it: "We throw a lot of things at the wall and some things stick and some things don't".

See what sticks tomorrow when eighth blackbird plays at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM).

This Grammy award-winning ensemble - which combines the finesse of a string quartet with the energy of a rock band - is tackling new music by composers whose names may not be familiar (Mazzoli, Hartke and Ledger).

Munro promises "we will come together and play as if our lives depended on it".

"That's how it's gotta be. Some performers are so obsessed with sounding pretty; they lose sight of the ultimate goal, which is communicating emotion," he says.

Brisbane-born Munro is the sole Aussie in eighth blackbird. Band mates Michael Maccaferri (clarinet), Yvonne Lam (violin/ viola), Nicholas Photinos (cello), Lisa Kaplan (piano) and Matthew Duvall (percussion) hail from North America.

But their ANAM gig - featuring musicians of the academy - is the first of two visits Down Under. Next April eighth blackbird join the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for the company's 2012 Metropolis New Music Festival.

Munro says the three-program festival will be "a journey across contemporary American music ... a sort of high, classical, snooty version of a road trip. We're not doing country and western or blues".

Not that eighth blackbird would be averse to exploring those sonic corners.

As Munro says: "We're all classically trained, we've sweated over our scales, but what we're doing now is using that in the service of music that comes from many different universes."