Geelong’s Vicki Hallett was a founding member of the Geelong Symphony Orchestra, has played clarinet to a pod of hippopotamuses on a rock in the middle of the Limpopo River and, more recently, recorded an album in the Amazon. Matt Hewson caught up with Vicki to hear about the path that led her to the depths of the jungle.
Most people can sum up their occupation in a few words; “newspaper journalist”, “truck driver” or “store manager” convey succinctly the range of activities one undertakes as part of their job.
Vicki Hallett finds that people, even some she has known for a while, still ask her what, exactly, she does.
“I kind of made up my job,” Vicki laughs.
Having served for 13 years as a member of the Royal Australian Air Force Band, Vicki, a clarinettist, continued teaching music – she has taught at Grovedale College (among other schools) since 1994 – but found it did not quite scratch the creative itch.
“I thought, I want to play, but I want to play on my own terms,” she says.
“And one of the things that I kept going back to was this ethnomusicology and acoustic ecology that I’d learned about (while studying at the Victorian College of the Arts).
“It had always interested me, and I thought what can I do to harness all these interests? What do I do that’s different to everyone else?
“So I thought I’d play clarinet and make up what I wanted to play. And then I got into using the sounds with the Elephant Listening Project.”
While in the process of investigating birdsong, Vicki came across Cornell University’s Adelson Library, part of its Lab of Ornithology and home to a wealth of ornithological books and journals.
She noticed a drop-down menu labelled ‘Elephant Listening Project’. The project, which had the goal of conserving rainforests through a focus on elephants, collected and interpreted the sounds of the towering animals and their ecosystem.
“I thought, elephants, that sounds really interesting, so I approached them…with a concept, and they were happy for me to use their sounds to create compositions,” Vicki says.
“So I was like, wow, I’d better do this now, I’ve got to deliver. They were sending me sounds from the field in Gabon, there were recorders that were hung from jungle trees, some were on the elephants themselves.
“And from there I learned more about infrasound and ultrasound, and I started analysing it, going to conferences, learning about bioacoustics, ecoacoustics…it was a real rabbit hole, it was exciting.”
In 2015 Vicki released ‘Elephant Song’, the product of the collaboration with Cornell, going on to perform the project live in a variety of settings, sometimes solo, sometimes with other musicians.
Two years later, Vicki attended the Sonic Mmabolela residency at Mmabolela Reserve in the Limpopo Valley savanna in South Africa, right at its border with Botswana.
The annual two-week event draws composers, audio artists, sound designers and other creatives who engage in field work, studio work, discussions and presentations on environmental sound recordings.
“I ended up playing on Mabolel Rock, and while I was playing hippos came up and I did a bit of a call-and-response performance with that,” she says.
“I had transcribed the hippo call, so I was doing the pitch that called them, that was familiar to them, and a rhythm that was familiar to them.
“I had done a lot of preparation at the site, sitting there for a long time just being a part of it. I felt I was highly attuned to the environment.”
It was while looking into opportunities to travel to Antarctica to explore a project focused on whales that Vicki was first presented with the possibility of going to the Amazon.
“I ended up on a Zoom call with Gordon Hempton, who’s known as the ‘Soundtracker’,” she says.
“He has an NGO called Quiet Parks International, and I had become a member of that as a field recordist.
“And during the Zoom he said ‘hey, would you like to come to the Amazon and see the world’s first quiet park?’.”
While Vicki couldn’t take up Hempton’s initial offer – “he said he was leaving in three weeks, and I didn’t think I could get it all together in that time” – they ended up organising a trip for her and five other field recordists to travel to the Amazon in February 2023.
Vicki, after getting approval from the local Ecuadorian chiefs, packed her clarinet.
After arriving in Quito, Ecuador, Vicki’s party made their way to Loreto and then to a village in the rainforest, where they stayed for a few days to record and prepare for the trek to the Zabalo River, close to where the borders of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia converge.
Vicki recorded improvisations at both the Zabalo and the village, drawing on the natural surroundings to inform her playing. The murmuring of the river became the Wakened by Mermaids movement of the piece Voices of the Zabalo; the cicadas and insects in and around the boughs and roots of a huge ceiba tree at the village became The Forest Humming movement of Wrapped in the Arms of a Giant.
“I was quite surprised how well it turned out in the end,” Vicki says.
“I remember finishing playing at the river and thinking, I don’t know that I could ever do this again.
“I’ve played some hard gigs and it was probably the hardest gig, the recording along the river. It had taken so much to get there, we were so isolated, and also it actually took so many people to get to that moment.”
The album documenting the journey and Vicki’s performances, Live in the Amazon, comes out tomorrow (Saturday, February 24).
