About Sally
NB: What follows here is the... unofficial bio. If you want the official bio, CV and photos, you can download them here
Welcome to the unofficial bio. of Sally Whitwell, pianist and composer, and thank you for being interested in more than my traditional. classical music achievement list. Got a cup of tea and a biscuit? You might need fuel to get through the whole of my music memoir.
I grew up in Canberra, Australia. The Nation’s Capital. The Bush Capital (that nome always kinda makes me giggle). It’s a great city for kids to grow up in, particularly for outdoorsy stuff. With Lake Burley Griffin and other large tracts of bushland only twenty minutes from anywhere, it is very easy to be somewhere beautiful pretty quickly. In my childhood, there was lots of roller skating, tree climbing, skipping stones on the water, and running through waist high piles of autumn leaves. The change of seasons is so colourfully vivid in Canberra, so through the lens of nostalgia, my early childhood looks a little like the cover image on one of those 1970s knitting patterns. You know the sort.
So I liked being active but I was definitely not a sporty kid. Those kids scared me. They were the ones who bullied me all the way through school, the ponytailed netball girls of my nightmares. I just couldn’t see the point of sport (I still can’t) but I knew I needed physical activity in my life. The logical choice was something that combined physical activity with some of kind aesthetic i.e. ballet. Dancing is so beautiful and such a wonderful feeling. With enough practise, one’s grand jeté feels as close to flying as any human activity can, and with the added bonus of so much fabulous ballet music (Tchaikovsky! Prokofiev!) I was in seventh heaven. Perhaps that’s when it became evident that it wasn’t necessarily the dancing that really excited me, it was actually how the combination of the music and the dancing made me feel.
Eventually I had to make a choice and obviously, music won.
Piano is my first instrument and my first love. I had piano lessons with the kind but firm Janice Battison, and after she died, with the warm but formidable Ann Thompson. Every Tuesday afternoon, I went to Miss Thompson’s studio in Waramanga for my lesson. I was always her first student of the day, so it was my job to pour her a cup of drip filter coffee from the machine in the kitchen and pop a halved Scotch Finger biscuit on the saucer (she was not a coffee mug kind of person, always cup and saucer). I would try not to spill it as her cocker spaniel Ludwig ran around my feet excitedly. It was always a challenge too to look out for the other spaniel, Wolfgang. He was blind, and although he very well knew his way around that house, sometimes I think he was just playing us, bumping into things for sympathy and extra pats.
My piano diet was a combination of some traditional repertoire, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, plus a reasonable amount of the much funnerer stuff: Bartok, Poulenc, Debussy and Gershwin. At home, it was a bit of the same, with a decent helping of Schubert songs, Bach and Handel choral works, the Beatles and prog rock, especially Pink Floyd. I flirted with musicals and mainstream pop in a vain attempt to fit in with my peers, but my heart wasn’t really in it.
I quit ballet with the kind of tearful anger that characterises big changes during adolescence. But I had to do it. I knew I needed to get into an orchestra somehow because… that sound! My mum took me to see an oboe teacher who told me I wasn’t physically suited to the instrument (?) and promptly sent me next door to the bassoon teacher, Rick McIntyre. He was hilarious, very encouraging, and I started right away. My school music teacher Mary Tatchell pulled a serviceable ebonite student bassoon out of the cupboard, dusted it off and presented it to me as some kind of fait accompli. Within the year she’d invited me to join the school symphony orchestra.
Three years of school orchestra, and I thought the bassoon was it. I started a degree with a bassoon major at the Australian National University School of Music in 1992. It was great to play in an orchestra because you learn so much from just sitting and observing all the other instruments. Although I was painfully shy and awkward, I still enjoyed the social aspect too. Canberra Youth Orchestra (Fun!), National Music Camp (Disaster!) Canberra Philharmonic Society pit orchestras for The Mikado and Fiddler on the Roof (Fun and Educational).
But there was no way that I could leave the piano behind either. Having enjoyed accompanying all my high school choirs, I was still loving accompanying my university student peers, as well as making some pocket money as accompanist and repetiteur for The Llewellyn Choir, Intervarsity Choral Festival, and Canberra Childrens Choir. Kind of prophetic in a way.
Whilst the bassoon was a great way to learn about the orchestra, it was clear that life was not for me. I auditioned and was accepted into the graduate program at Sydney Conservatorium majoring in Piano Accompaniment. There was no way I thought I could ever be a piano soloist, but I was very happy to be a kind of career accompanist. In hindsight, those lessons I had from David Miller in how to accompany… they were actually the best music lessons of my life.
And moving to Sydney was a good thing for me, enabling me to come to terms with my queerness. I immersed myself in the LGBTQIA+ community through a job I had accompanying the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir, and also through going a bit wild on the queer party scene. It was a rite of passage. I have no regrets.
For years, things basically went as I had planned. I was a career accompanist, working with choirs and soloists and on the occasional musical. I was a chamber musician, a cabaret artist, and got into the Sydney new music scene a bit. It was great but something was still missing. That thing was composing.
The catalyst for my starting composing at the ripe old age of 34 (that is old in composer years) was that I fell in love. Cheesy, right? I dedicated to my partner a choral setting of Byron’s She Walks in Beauty and was surprised that it became something of an instant hit within my small circle of choir nerd friends and on ABC Classic breakfast. It’s so interesting to me that the first thing I ever wrote is still the most played of all my original songs on Spotify, nearly a decade after it was recorded. Must be because you can really hear the love in it. I dunno, it’s all subjective.
Many years of composition experiments followed. I could’ve enrolled in a composition degree I guess, but having dropped out of the Sydney Conservatorium some years earlier, I just didn’t feel that institutional learning was really for me at that stage in my life. So I muddled through on my own, conducting the kinds of experiments that undergraduate students do to find their voice. I wrote choral music, chamber music, piano solos, art songs and cabaret songs, even an awesome teen musical Deadpan Anti-Fan. It’s a continuing journey, but nothing has accelerated it like the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
During the early lockdowns in 2020, I found myself enduring a complete creative block. I composed nothing for months. I let opportunities and collaborations slide, because I knew I simply couldn’t deliver. It was debilitating and depressing and I seriously considering packing it all in and getting a day job.
But instead, I embarked on a new creative practice. I took some of the composition exercises that I usually give to my high school students, and forced myself to complete them daily. Every single day. For the first couple of weeks, I was admittedly a bit inconsistent, but it didn’t take me long to get into a habit. Soon I was actually leaping out of bed to compose every morning and basically I haven’t skipped a day since. Some might say I have become a little superstitious about it, because I know it won’t be a good day if I don’t do it. Normally I compose at my desk in my studio, but if I have to, I will write in hotel rooms, on planes, and waiting in the emergency room at RPA Hospital (true story). It’s like this one thing I can control in a crazy world. The process continues to clarify my creative voice, kind of like wiping the mirror every morning and looking at myself anew. It has led to some of the most satisfying collaborations of my life thus far and I feel incredibly lucky.
Which brings us to the present day. I hope you’ll join me as I continue on this creative path. Life’s too short not to follow your truth.
Love, Salx
Welcome to the unofficial bio. of Sally Whitwell, pianist and composer, and thank you for being interested in more than my traditional. classical music achievement list. Got a cup of tea and a biscuit? You might need fuel to get through the whole of my music memoir.
I grew up in Canberra, Australia. The Nation’s Capital. The Bush Capital (that nome always kinda makes me giggle). It’s a great city for kids to grow up in, particularly for outdoorsy stuff. With Lake Burley Griffin and other large tracts of bushland only twenty minutes from anywhere, it is very easy to be somewhere beautiful pretty quickly. In my childhood, there was lots of roller skating, tree climbing, skipping stones on the water, and running through waist high piles of autumn leaves. The change of seasons is so colourfully vivid in Canberra, so through the lens of nostalgia, my early childhood looks a little like the cover image on one of those 1970s knitting patterns. You know the sort.
So I liked being active but I was definitely not a sporty kid. Those kids scared me. They were the ones who bullied me all the way through school, the ponytailed netball girls of my nightmares. I just couldn’t see the point of sport (I still can’t) but I knew I needed physical activity in my life. The logical choice was something that combined physical activity with some of kind aesthetic i.e. ballet. Dancing is so beautiful and such a wonderful feeling. With enough practise, one’s grand jeté feels as close to flying as any human activity can, and with the added bonus of so much fabulous ballet music (Tchaikovsky! Prokofiev!) I was in seventh heaven. Perhaps that’s when it became evident that it wasn’t necessarily the dancing that really excited me, it was actually how the combination of the music and the dancing made me feel.
Eventually I had to make a choice and obviously, music won.
Piano is my first instrument and my first love. I had piano lessons with the kind but firm Janice Battison, and after she died, with the warm but formidable Ann Thompson. Every Tuesday afternoon, I went to Miss Thompson’s studio in Waramanga for my lesson. I was always her first student of the day, so it was my job to pour her a cup of drip filter coffee from the machine in the kitchen and pop a halved Scotch Finger biscuit on the saucer (she was not a coffee mug kind of person, always cup and saucer). I would try not to spill it as her cocker spaniel Ludwig ran around my feet excitedly. It was always a challenge too to look out for the other spaniel, Wolfgang. He was blind, and although he very well knew his way around that house, sometimes I think he was just playing us, bumping into things for sympathy and extra pats.
My piano diet was a combination of some traditional repertoire, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, plus a reasonable amount of the much funnerer stuff: Bartok, Poulenc, Debussy and Gershwin. At home, it was a bit of the same, with a decent helping of Schubert songs, Bach and Handel choral works, the Beatles and prog rock, especially Pink Floyd. I flirted with musicals and mainstream pop in a vain attempt to fit in with my peers, but my heart wasn’t really in it.
I quit ballet with the kind of tearful anger that characterises big changes during adolescence. But I had to do it. I knew I needed to get into an orchestra somehow because… that sound! My mum took me to see an oboe teacher who told me I wasn’t physically suited to the instrument (?) and promptly sent me next door to the bassoon teacher, Rick McIntyre. He was hilarious, very encouraging, and I started right away. My school music teacher Mary Tatchell pulled a serviceable ebonite student bassoon out of the cupboard, dusted it off and presented it to me as some kind of fait accompli. Within the year she’d invited me to join the school symphony orchestra.
Three years of school orchestra, and I thought the bassoon was it. I started a degree with a bassoon major at the Australian National University School of Music in 1992. It was great to play in an orchestra because you learn so much from just sitting and observing all the other instruments. Although I was painfully shy and awkward, I still enjoyed the social aspect too. Canberra Youth Orchestra (Fun!), National Music Camp (Disaster!) Canberra Philharmonic Society pit orchestras for The Mikado and Fiddler on the Roof (Fun and Educational).
But there was no way that I could leave the piano behind either. Having enjoyed accompanying all my high school choirs, I was still loving accompanying my university student peers, as well as making some pocket money as accompanist and repetiteur for The Llewellyn Choir, Intervarsity Choral Festival, and Canberra Childrens Choir. Kind of prophetic in a way.
Whilst the bassoon was a great way to learn about the orchestra, it was clear that life was not for me. I auditioned and was accepted into the graduate program at Sydney Conservatorium majoring in Piano Accompaniment. There was no way I thought I could ever be a piano soloist, but I was very happy to be a kind of career accompanist. In hindsight, those lessons I had from David Miller in how to accompany… they were actually the best music lessons of my life.
And moving to Sydney was a good thing for me, enabling me to come to terms with my queerness. I immersed myself in the LGBTQIA+ community through a job I had accompanying the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir, and also through going a bit wild on the queer party scene. It was a rite of passage. I have no regrets.
For years, things basically went as I had planned. I was a career accompanist, working with choirs and soloists and on the occasional musical. I was a chamber musician, a cabaret artist, and got into the Sydney new music scene a bit. It was great but something was still missing. That thing was composing.
The catalyst for my starting composing at the ripe old age of 34 (that is old in composer years) was that I fell in love. Cheesy, right? I dedicated to my partner a choral setting of Byron’s She Walks in Beauty and was surprised that it became something of an instant hit within my small circle of choir nerd friends and on ABC Classic breakfast. It’s so interesting to me that the first thing I ever wrote is still the most played of all my original songs on Spotify, nearly a decade after it was recorded. Must be because you can really hear the love in it. I dunno, it’s all subjective.
Many years of composition experiments followed. I could’ve enrolled in a composition degree I guess, but having dropped out of the Sydney Conservatorium some years earlier, I just didn’t feel that institutional learning was really for me at that stage in my life. So I muddled through on my own, conducting the kinds of experiments that undergraduate students do to find their voice. I wrote choral music, chamber music, piano solos, art songs and cabaret songs, even an awesome teen musical Deadpan Anti-Fan. It’s a continuing journey, but nothing has accelerated it like the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.
During the early lockdowns in 2020, I found myself enduring a complete creative block. I composed nothing for months. I let opportunities and collaborations slide, because I knew I simply couldn’t deliver. It was debilitating and depressing and I seriously considering packing it all in and getting a day job.
But instead, I embarked on a new creative practice. I took some of the composition exercises that I usually give to my high school students, and forced myself to complete them daily. Every single day. For the first couple of weeks, I was admittedly a bit inconsistent, but it didn’t take me long to get into a habit. Soon I was actually leaping out of bed to compose every morning and basically I haven’t skipped a day since. Some might say I have become a little superstitious about it, because I know it won’t be a good day if I don’t do it. Normally I compose at my desk in my studio, but if I have to, I will write in hotel rooms, on planes, and waiting in the emergency room at RPA Hospital (true story). It’s like this one thing I can control in a crazy world. The process continues to clarify my creative voice, kind of like wiping the mirror every morning and looking at myself anew. It has led to some of the most satisfying collaborations of my life thus far and I feel incredibly lucky.
Which brings us to the present day. I hope you’ll join me as I continue on this creative path. Life’s too short not to follow your truth.
Love, Salx