What can you tell us about your upcoming project, Unrepresentative Swill, which will be performed at QPAC on Wednesday July 29 as part of the Queensland Music Festival?
Well we’ve taken a bunch of prime ministerial speeches – a representative sample across a lot of them – and set them to music. Many of them are with the original audio of the speech, so we sing along with the audio and instruments and harmonisations and all sorts of bells and whistles. And sometimes for the prime ministers, like Billy Hughes, who were before recorded speech was around, we set the text of the speech. For this project we worked with Brisbane’s Topology, who is between a band and a classical quintet, and The Australian Voices, so the choir and instruments together explore our nation’s history through prime ministerial speeches.

How long did it take to put it all together?
We’ve been working on these pieces for a few years, on and off. The first one was when Rob Davidson, the composer, had the idea to set Julia Gillard’s Misogyny speech to music for us – that was really artistically successful, we loved doing that and I was very proud of what Rob accomplished. So then we did a few more – we did a piece about the Rudd apology, where Rob slowed down the original audio of Kevin Rudd saying “We apologise” by 300 times and we sang that slowed-down version, and then he sped it back up again, so we were able to recreate those words. And then Queensland Music Festival got interested when James Morrison saw the videos and he suggested that we do a concert of more prime ministers.

You collaborated with local beatboxer Tom Thum for the upcoming Brisbane Festival show Thum Prints; how did that come about, who approached who?
That was the idea of Richard Wenn, the artistic administrator of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. He put Tom and I together and then Brisbane Festival came on board and we made it happen. We performed our first version a few months ago at Brisbane Powerhouse and now we have this one coming up. It was just an astonishing creative process – it was something that neither Tom nor I could have achieved on our own. When you get two creative people who are completely different, it’s really exciting to extend yourself in the direction of the other person. It’s been a challenge for me to get my head around all sorts of hip-hop culture – like how do you make a bassoon and double bass do that? So Tom taught me a lot, and in the same token, he had to get his head around how to be completely precise in an orchestral way. A lot of what Tom does is semi-improvised – he often plans it and has an idea of what he’s going to do, but he does something slightly longer or shorter from night to night, and it doesn’t really matter. But when he’s working with an orchestra there are all these musicians who have to be completely tight with him, so his level of precision has to be very high as well. It’s been a challenge and a joy for both sides.

Has the experience inspired you to strike up any other interesting musical collaborations?
Absolutely! Tom and I will probably work together again next year on a different project, and we’re going to do our Thum Prints project a bunch of times next year with different orchestras including an orchestra in Cologne, Germany. So we’re going to rework it yet again for that. That same orchestra has also just asked me to write a piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger, taking a few chunks of audio and having an orchestra play with it as it repeats. So I’ve become interested in not just making classical music – although of course I do enjoy it – but I’m also very interested in expanded forms like an orchestra or choir with recordings.

We adored ‘The 9 Cutest Things That Ever Happened’ from 2013, how on earth did you dream that up?
Yeah, that was really fun! We had singers from all around the country for a project and we had an extra day to do something, so I thought we needed to do something really cool. We were discussing what we wanted to do and found this list of cute things on the internet so I set it to music in the manner of an Anglican hymn. It sounds a little bit churchy and reflective, but then the language is so immediate and internet. We recorded it and filmed it, and then it went totally nuts – I didn’t expect it to go quite that viral!

You seem to enjoy bringing a sense of fun and playfulness to music, what can you tell us about the motivations behind compositions like ‘Tra$h Ma$h’ and ‘Toy Story 3 = Awesome!’?
I really like the modern world, I like the internet and I’m also a classical musician and a composer, so I like to bring those things together. I don’t think classical music needs to be something that’s stuck in the past, it’s something that is alive today, and the modern world is there to be used and commented on, and cut up and stuck back together – that’s what I really enjoy. It often comes across as a bit playful or ironic or humorous – and I don’t ever try to be funny when I’m composing, that’s not what I’m about – I like irony and that just comes about from marrying these two worlds.

You also spent a bit of time teaching a choir of kids at the Hear and Say Centre, what can you remember about that experience?
Yeah, I was volunteering at the Hear and Say Centre a few years ago and we created this choir of kids with cochlear implants – without those cochlear implants many of them would be profoundly deaf, or mostly deaf. We were able to create a choir and they sang. It was a really special experience, I loved it. It was really touching when they performed in public because of the idea that without this miraculous piece of technology, music would be something they couldn’t access. It was very cute and beautiful.

What would you say are the biggest challenges in your line of work?
Funding is a very difficult problem for the arts in Australia. To be able to do projects on a professional level is very, very tricky. All the small to medium arts organisations in Australia are really making it work by making small miracles happen and figuring out how to do things on a very small budget. We need art in our lives.

And what is it that you love about your job – what gets you out of bed each morning and inspires you to keep working so hard?
The possibility of making cool things and sharing them – that’s what I love, that’s what excites me. The process of experimentation occasionally turns out drivel, so you tend not to share that as much, but the stuff that turns out alright, I’m quite proud of and I really, really enjoy.

FAVOURITE WEEKEND SPOT TO:
Perk up … Blue Basement Cafe in South Bank; I think it’s one of the best places in Brisbane.
Catch up … Kettle and Tin in Paddington.
Be inspired … I like going for long drives and listening to music and podcasts.