A cycle of six songs for Contralto or Mezzo-Soprano and Piano Trio with players using additional mallets, picks, chains, stompbox, shaker, tambourine and two EBows.
Ghost Ships was composed for Muses Trio, a Queensland-based, all-female ensemble that celebrates music composed by women. The song cycle champions women's perspectives and puts a feminist spin on sea song tropes, which typically privilege masculine viewpoints due to their historical association with seafaring occupations. This theme plays out in Ghost Ships' structure, which begins by reconfiguring two song forms—a lament and a drinking song—and recasting them from female characters' perspectives.
The next two songs incorporate the composer's personal history into the cycle. Nanna Josephine's Journey blends the blues with a Romantic-era ballad to tell Klein's grandmother's story of traveling to Australia by ship alone with her children. Shark Attack! combines elements of sea shanties and children's songs to explore the macabre delight children take in hearing scary stories, and is based on Klein’s father's childhood experience.
The final pair of songs delve into the lives of colonial women forcibly transported to Australia: Charlotte Badger and Mary Bryant. Lady Badger's Piratical Reel pushes the form of the reel to absurd lengths, highlighting the false portrayal of Charlotte Badger as Australia's first female pirate by writers over more than 200 years. The final song, Remembering Charlotte, reimagines the homecoming ballad as an elegy for Mary Bryant's daughter Charlotte Spence, who was born and died during Mary's journeys to and from Australia. Through this three-stage progression, Ghost Ships transforms traditional sea songs with a uniquely feminine and Australian perspective.
Ghost Ships artwork by Eve Klein.
Each Person would have their name, instruments, bio, links etc under each image, along with photographer credit etc if required.