Forty-Two Years of Song: Farewell to The Song Company
This morning, Sydney Performing Arts supporters woke to sad news. The Board of The Song Company announced it has resolved to appoint a liquidator, bringing to a close 42 years of extraordinary vocal artistry. For those of us who have sat in darkened auditorium in seventh heaven as the Song Company wove together a centuries-old work, or had us leaning forward in excitement at a bold new commissioned piece — this is a genuine loss.
The Song Company was not merely a performing ensemble. They were a world class vocal group who mentored up and coming singers and trail blazed with ambitious programming across a millennium of music genres.
A Vision Born in 1984
The ensemble was founded in Sydney in 1984 by conductor and music educator Charles Colman OAM, under the auspices of Sydney Philharmonia. Colman had already demonstrated his vision for professional vocal music in Australia by transforming the Leonine Consort into a professional ensemble in the late 1970s, notably premiering Peter Sculthorpe‘s The Stars Turn in 1979. He saw a gap in Australia’s professional vocal landscape and moved to fill it.
The original eight-voice ensemble made its debut at Rothbury Estate in the Hunter Valley. Within two years they were performing at the Adelaide Festival. The founding singers — among them Margaret Schindler, Romola Tyrrell, James Bonnefin and Stephen Bennett — set a standard of excellence the company would carry forward for four decades. Colman stepped down in 1988 due to ill health, leaving an organisation that had already proved its worth.
The Peelman Era: A Golden Quarter Century
If Colman lit the flame, it was Belgian-born conductor Roland Peelman who tended it into a blaze. Taking the helm in 1990, Peelman led The Song Company for 25 years, shaping it into one of our most admired and innovative performing ensembles. Under his direction, the repertoire expanded in all directions — from early sacred polyphony to brand-new Australian commissions, from intimate a cappella to staged theatrical works.
National touring deepened. International recognition grew. Collaborations with artists and ensembles including the Australian Chamber Orchestra produced some incredibly memorable nights in Australian chamber music.
Peelman’s 25 years are, by any measure, a remarkable artistic stewardship. It is poignant — and somehow fitting — that he returned this year as guest director for the ensemble’s final major project: Heinrich Schütz’s Der Schwanengesang, a program of motets for double choir performed in May across Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra and Wollongong. A “swan song” in the most literal sense.
Leadership and Change
Antony Pitts, the British composer, conductor, and broadcaster, succeeded Peelman as Artistic Director in 2016 and led the company for seven years, bringing with him a formidable international pedigree — former BBC Senior Producer, Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music and founder of the acclaimed early music ensemble TONUS PEREGRINUS.
Almost immediately, Pitts established The Song Company’s SongCo LABs, in which emerging artists and accomplished amateurs took part in workshops, masterclasses and ensemble singing alongside the company’s principal artists. This was followed by the Ensemble Artist and Apprentice Programs providing training, mentoring and performance opportunities for new, emerging artists.
His programming ranged boldly across genres, periods and causes. Songs From The Heart was a creative collaboration with Indigenous composers and singers Elizabeth Sheppard and Sonya Holowell, a powerful a cappella response to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. For his second to last concert in 2022, he chose a characteristically ambitious farewell: placing eight five-part choirs in the arched stone galleries of St Mary’s Crypt (read the review here) — an experience usually reserved for the singers themselves.
In 2023, following a strategic review, the company shifted to an artist-led model, appointing soprano Amy Moore and mezzo-soprano Jessica O’Donoghue as Co-Artistic Directors from 2024. The company’s 40th anniversary was celebrated with events honouring its commissioning history, a legacy that saw singers perform, in the words of one former member, “hundreds of world premieres.”
When Administration Can Break What Art Builds
The company was not a stranger to adversity. In 2019 it faced a serious financial crisis, entering administration and coming close to insolvency before surviving to fight on. It is worth pausing here to reflect on something that arts organisations of all sizes must take seriously: a performing arts company can be undone, not from the stage but, from the back office.
The Song Company’s 2019 difficulties were, in part, attributable to a period of administrative mismanagement. But it would be too easy to lay the blame solely on one individual. The harder, more honest question is this: how are admin and management staff appointed in the first place?
Artists and board members are often exceptional at what they do, but they may genuinely be out of their depth when it comes to assessing the administrative or financial capability of a candidate. Reading between the lines of a CV, knowing which references to call and what to ask them; running a structured interview that tests real competency… these are skills that are critical for the recruitment process.
Recruitment is an area where government arts agencies could play a genuinely practical role. Create NSW, for example, or an equivalent government agent, could offer support to help small-to-medium arts organisations through their senior staff recruitment. That might include providing training in how to assess candidates or offering an independent reviewer to sit in on shortlisting and interviews to provide training for future recruiting. This training could be so very valuable in helping prevent the demise of our precious Performing Arts organisations.
Boards carry a fiduciary responsibility to their organisations, their artists, their audiences and their communities. Knowing when to ask for help is not a weakness, it is exactly the kind of leadership these organisations need.
To the Performers: Thank You
To every singer who has stood in formation and given voice with The Song Company, in church halls, concert halls, crypts, galleries, cell blocks, schools and festival stages across this country, please know that your contribution mattered. Every moment you raise the vibration of one person with your singing or music, you are making the world a better place.
A Broader Call to Action
The Song Company’s closure arrives in a moment of real pressure for Australia’s small-to-medium arts sector. These organisations, the ones that take risks, champion the new and build the pipeline of talent that feeds our major institutions, they operate on margins that leave no room for a single bad year, a funding cut or a global disruption. They need people like you in the seats, yes. But they also need philanthropic investment, government support that keeps pace with costs and communities that understand the difference between a city with a rich cultural life and one without.
If the loss of The Song Company prompts you to buy a ticket, make a donation or advocate loudly for arts funding, then this farewell, as sorrowful as it is, will have served one final purpose.
Vale, The Song Company.
Related links
Visit The Song Company website: https://the.song.company/
Create NSW https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/create-nsw
Regional Arts NSW https://regionalartsnsw.com.au/
