The Letter String Quartet Artistic Director and violist Biddy Connor has crafted a career by moving between worlds; she has studied vocal improvisation and graced front bar stages on the viola alongside Laura Jean.
Similarly, The Letter String Quartet’s (TLSQ) 'All The Stories' features a trinity of female artists from disparate worlds, in a work inspired by the segregation faced by women who resided at Melbourne’s Abbotsford Convent in the 1900s.
The viola, the violin’s bigger sibling, wasn’t Biddy Connor’s first love. She thought her career wouldn't be spent sawing a bow across frets but rather by creating resonation with her vocal cords, as she explains.
“I did start studying singing after I finished high school and I had played violin when I was younger and I thought that I wasn’t that keen on violin and I had learnt piano as well, there was a time where I secretly wanted to be a rock guitarist and I did make some attempt at that.”
Back in 2011, Biddy released her debut indie pop album, the self-titled 'Sailor Days', with AIR Award-nominated folk artist Laura Jean on bass. Ultimately, the classical viola became her enduring obsession, though as she explains. . .
“I think, I did have that 'falling in love' with the viola but it wasn’t until quite late, in my early 20s, that I picked up the viola and started playing and I think I’m still in that period of intense learning.”
She does still get a chance to sing, though. As part of The Letter String Quartet, who have performed with Gang Of Youths on MTV Unplugged, appeared at the Melbourne Recital Centre and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival, recorded with Jen Cloher and Augie March, and composed innovative new works, including 'All The Stories', which was inspired by one of Biddy’s previous day jobs, as she explains.
“I worked for about seven years in an office at the Abbotsford Convent so I got to know the building and the surrounds quite well in that time and at that stage they were opening up different parts of the building that hadn’t been used for some time and there was a space there called the oratory that was an old chapel that had a stage at one end that had a domed window over the top of it, and I just thought it would be a beautiful place to play string quartet music in.”
While the convent is aesthetically beautiful, it has an ugly past, as Biddy explains.
“There was an area that was an orphanage, there was an area that the nuns lived and there was also an area for women who had become pregnant out of wedlock and all three of those groups of women were treated quite differently.”
“The fallen women who were there to have their children, they’d been sent there by their families, they were not allowed to mix with the orphaned children and I think in the church, they had them in an area where they couldn’t see each other.”
Prior to settlement, the land on which the convent was built was a sacred space for First Nations people, a meeting spot, a place where the rivers converged. 'All The Stories', through TLSQ’s music, poet Maria Zajkowski’s lyrics and The Orbweavers vocalist Marita Dyson’s vocals, explores how a single place’s meaning will inevitably be subjective, and depend upon the reasons that brought you there.
Biddy met Maria and Marita during her Sailor Days era and believes her artistry has been refined by her winding musical journey.
“Having the opportunity to muck around with being a singer in various different ways and playing the guitar quite nervously, all of that has given me an appreciation of the different angles of music.”
