Phoebe Smithies.

Horn.

Image by Daniel Rabin.

 

  • Children are the best at making art, they believe all the praise heaped on them by their parents and can be very prolific. I'd love to get back to creating as much as I did as a very young child.

  • I loved playing Cat Hope's visual score Lampi, which scrolled across all our iPad screens simultaneously in beautiful colours. I love the flexibility of a work like that, that it allows any instrument combination to create music together. Also the potential for it to be read and interpreted by people who can't read traditional music notation.

  • I'm a huge nerd for plugging up draughts in the home. I think it may be my secret life calling.

  • Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet ballet, which I played the suite of on violin as a teenager. I've always been fascinated with the tragedy of it. West Side Story (based on the same themes) probably comes a close second.

  • Breakaway by the Beach Boys, such high contagious energy. It's a hidden b-side but definitely worth looking up!

Phoebe Smithies is a Naarm-based freelance horn player by night and physiotherapist by day at a private practice in Tullamarine. She studied at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Australian National Academy of Music and has performed with Orchestra Victoria, Melbourne Opera, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Salon Project, a chamber music group that she co-founded in 2018.

Although Phoebe’s performing focus has been on traditional western notated “classical” music in the past, she is invested in being part of a new way to create music: one that is more inclusive, free-form and accessible to today’s audience. This is why she joined Forest Collective, whose innovative concerts have been drawing new crowds to modern music and creating more space for queer, indigenous and women artists. With COVID changing the Melbourne artscape so drastically, she believes it’s more important than ever to share in music making with wonderful musicians such as those in Forest Collective, and bring interesting, challenging and genre-bending music to an arts-starved audience.