The Museum at Melba Hall

Before its premiere in 2026, you are invited to experience a special preview of The Museum, a major new work by composer Steven Takasugi, created with Speak Percussion. This work-in-development showing offers a glimpse into Takasugi’s ambitious evening-length piece for three percussionists and electronics.

Drawing on materials and concepts from the Speak Percussion archives and the Grainger Museum Collection as part of Steven Takasugi's 2024 Grainger Creative Research Residency, this work reflects on collecting, preserving, and staging musical histories across concert hall, museum, and gallery. Commissioned for Speak Percussion’s 25th anniversary and developed in partnership with the Grainger Museum, the project interweaves personal and institutional histories to question how we collect, preserve, and pass on stories.

Percy Grainger’s passionate collecting expanded to 100,000 items spanning musical instruments and scores, furniture, fashion, ethnography, art and design, while Takasugi is also an avid collector, collecting and archiving acoustic sound samples into large databases that he carefully classifies.

This preview performance offers audiences the rare chance to step inside the creative process of a boundary-pushing collaboration and explore the idiosyncratic fascinations of musicians.

Join us at Grainger Museum from 5pm to visit Silent Hand Catches Silver Bell, the exhibition celebrating 25 years of Speak Percussion. See modified museum stands by Jebbah Baum from The Museum project on display before heading over to Melba Hall for the 6.30pm performance.

Locations

5–6.30pm – Exhibition visit
Grainger Museum
Gate 13, Royal Parade
Parkville

Credits

Steven Takasugi – composer 
Eugene Ughetti – performer / collaborator 
Kaylie Melville – performer / collaborator 
Louise Devenish – performer / collaborator

Speak Percussion takes percussive art to its physical and conceptual extremes. We shape the sounds of 21st century Australian percussion music through the creation and presentation of ambitious arts projects. Internationally recognised as a leader in the fields of experimental and contemporary classical music, Speak redefines the potential of percussion.

Steven Kazuo Takasugi, born 1960 in Los Angeles, is a composer of electro-acoustic concert music. This involves the collecting and archiving of recorded, acoustic sound samples into large databases, each classifying thousands of individual, performed instances collected over decades of experimentation and research, mostly conducted in his private sound laboratory. These are then subject to computer-assisted, algorithmic composition, revised and adjusted until the resulting emergent sound phenomena, energies, and relationships reveal hidden meanings and bewildering contexts to the composer.

Image credit: Crushed music stands from The Museum (2024) Steven Kazuo Takasugi. Photo: Jebbah Baum