A symphony about making money

Check the movement title. Michael Shmith reports from Melbourne:

The letters GFC, which stand for global financial crisis, are also notes of the musical scale. How appropriate, therefore, to combine the two. Meet a new 12-minute work by Melbourne composer Gawain Davey, called Symphony GFC.

Not that Davey thought of the idea himself. This is where business comes in, in the form of investment adviser and commentator Doug Turek, who commissioned the three-movement symphony. It was recorded in Melbourne last week by the 20-piece Orchestre Nouveau, conducted by Zach Tay, and will be released on Thursday – the fifth anniversary of the GFC.

The meeting of big business and high art is not exactly a novel concept. But this particular form of philanthropy – the musical depiction of the collapse of the international sharemarket – takes things to a new level. ”It was a difficult time that had quite an emotional impact on me,” Turek said. ”So I challenged Gawain, who’s a family friend, to put these emotions into music. To help, I gave him a chart of the sharemarket trajectory and a couple of movies about the GFC.”

Turek isn’t used to being a modern-day Medici. ”It all came together about three weeks ago and was a bit of shock,” he said. ”I didn’t realise what I thought was a simple music piece required more than 20 players. Each had to be paid, as well as hiring the venue. My budget blew out.”

symphonygfc.com