Salina Fisher: personal music for a worldwide audience

Salina Fisher is in Central Otago this week as composer-in-residence at the first At the World’s Edge Festival. Five of her compositions, including a world premiere, will feature in Festival programmes.

Composer Salina Fisher at the Lilburn Residence in Wellington

In February 2011 composer Salina Fisher moved from her home in Christchurch to Wellington to study at the New Zealand School of Music. She was 17 years old. Two days later, Christchurch was devastated by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake. “Everything I knew in Christchurch had changed forever, but I felt I wasn’t part of that because I wasn’t there. It was very complicated and confusing – a kind of grief but not personal.”

More than three years later, violist Bryony Cornish-Gibson, Fisher’s friend and musical colleague, asked for a solo piece and the young composer found a way to come to terms with her earthquake experience. “The solo viola seemed a way to express what I had been feeling. A solo string instrument can be strong but very vulnerable.” She called the work Reflect. “It was tough to write, a really painful process, but immediately afterwards I felt that something had lifted.”

In the past decade that personal quality in Fisher’s music has captured audiences and brought her acclaim and awards far beyond her expectations. In 2016 she was the youngest ever winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award for her orchestral work Rainphase, an evocative and assured composition first performed by the NZSO and since by major American orchestras. A year later she won the award again with Tōrino, commissioned by the New Zealand String Quartet. Her music has been performed and broadcast nationally and internationally and, while studying in New York between 2017-2019 for her Masters at the Manhattan School of Music, she won the Carl Kanter Prize for orchestral composition. In 2019 she was appointed Composer-in-Residence at the NZSM, taking up residence in the Lilburn House in Wellington, and since 2020 she has been a Teaching Fellow at the NZSM.

Salina Fisher

…winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award at the APRA Silver Scrolls in 2016 and 2017

This month Fisher turned 28. Is she surprised by the speed with which she has become established as a composer and the opportunities and commissions she is frequently offered?  “Very, very surprised!” she says with characteristic humility. “I had visions and dreams when I was younger, but I would never have dreamed that all of this would have happened so quickly. It’s amazing! I’m very grateful for every opportunity that comes my way and it means a lot to me that people seem to resonate with what I’m writing.”

Reflect and four other works by Fisher will be featured in the upcoming programmes of the inaugural At the World’s Edge Festival, where she is composer-in-residence. “It’s really exciting to be part of a brand-new festival, in the South Island, in the gorgeous Central Otago region. I know that region well, having grown up in Christchurch. And it’s a privilege to be involved before it comes to life, to be part of curating it - they’ve invited me to be part of those conversations.”

The Clutha River Mata-Au

Salina Fisher’s composition has the feeling of movement on the surface of the river.

The region itself has inspired her new work, Mata-Au for string trio, commissioned for premiere at the AWE Festival. “Mata-Au is the te reo Māori name for the Clutha River,” Fisher explains, “and one of the Festival themes is the connection by water, with the river part of that. The name means ‘surface current’.” Fisher’s compositions often draw on her dual heritage from New Zealand and Japan. “In Japanese, there’s the same word ‘mata-au’, with the same pronunciation, and it means ‘see you again’ or ‘to meet again after a long time’. So, the piece has a sense of excitement, with the feeling of movement on the surface of the water and the idea that water connects places and people.”

Alongside Mata-Au and Reflect, the AWE Festival has programmed Fisher’s Yabo for violin and viola, inspired by both an ancient Japanese court instrument and the contemporary meaning of the Japanese word, her beautiful and melancholy mono no aware for cello and piano, named for another Japanese concept about the transience of existence and a string quartet, Silhouettes, written in her teens.

Fisher’s music continues to be played worldwide. With COVID shut-downs, some scheduled international performances have been postponed, but recently, she tells me, things have picked up. The London-based Marmen Quartet, disappointingly unable to visit New Zealand late in 2020 as planned, have been performing her new work Heal, commissioned for their New Zealand tour, in European concerts, including one in the prestigious Berlin venue, the Pierre Boulez Saal. “It’s really strange for me,” she says rather sadly, “because the work has been performed a number of times and I still haven’t heard it live.”  She’s excited that her piano trio Kintsugi, commissioned and toured by the NZ Trio in 2020, has been scheduled for a New York performance in April 2022 by the Chamber Music Society of the Lincoln Center. New Zealand audiences can hear the work again at the Adam Celebration in Nelson on Waitangi Day in February next year.

Fisher remains very busy with composition projects and commissions, some of which, she says, are “big ones, still under wraps.” Smaller projects underway range from an art song to a small piece for younger string players and a work for taonga pūoro and violin commissioned by Forest & Bird. “I find it really hard to say ‘no’”, she says, laughing, “but I’ve had to recently because I’ve already got a lot of things on my plate.”

In some ways her biggest project over the past two years, she says, has been her teaching of composition at the NZSM. “I love it, but it’s extremely time-consuming if you’re a perfectionist like me.  It’s so much fun to introduce people to new ideas and skills and music that they’ve never come across and watch them develop as composers. And it definitely has fed in to my own composition.”

Fisher’s recent teaching has included a unit on composing for voice. Her teacher in the States, Susan Botti, is a vocalist composer and has helped with the planning of Fisher’s university course. Now, Fisher is putting some of that to use in a big project of her own, an opera for which she’s collaborating with another young artist, acclaimed Wellington playwright, director and performer Cassandra Tse, Artistic Director of Red Scare Theatre Company.

Salina Fisher is collaborating on an opera project with Cassandra Tse

“It’s not strictly an opera, it’s a musical staged work. It will have a chamber ensemble of instrumentalists and 9 singers – specifically, 9 Chinese women singers. We’re at the stage where we’re going to pitch it to various festivals and find someone to help us develop it to its final form. A lot of the work will be done next year, but the performance will be after that.” She beams broadly. “I’m really, really excited about it.” It sounds as if we should be too.

 Read more about the At the World’s Edge Festival and Director Justine Cormack here.