[Special] Australia: The Grigoryan Brothers
Slava and Leonard, the Grigoryan Brothers, by Simon Schiff
In this special episode the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan take us back into Australian history in three enchanting pieces of music. Each track features on their acclaimed album, This Is Us, which arose out of a collaborative project with the National Museum of Australia.
*** [About our format] ***
Australia is simultaneously a very young and a very old country. While the modern state traces its origins back to the eighteenth-century and the arrival of Europeans, for tens of thousands of years before this the great southern land had been continuously inhabited by Aboriginal and Torres Islander Strait Peoples.
This dual dimension helps shapes the nation’s identity today and is very much present in the collections of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. There visitors can tour Aboriginal-led exhibitions like Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters and browse objects that belong to the modern era of Australian history, from Donald Bradman’s cricket bat to the nineteenth-century refractor telescopes that helped astronomers to first sweep the southern skies.
To mark its twentieth birthday in 2021 the museum invited the multi-award winning guitarists Slava and Leonard Grigoryan – who together perform as the Grigoryan Brothers – to select a series of objects and use them as the inspiration for original compositions. The project went forward during the Covid 19 Pandemic of 2020 and resulted in the critically acclaimed album, This Is Us.
Historical Map of Australia, 1860, Wiki Commons
In this special episode of Travels Through Time we amend our usual format so that we can talk about this musical project and the historical stories that inspired three particular songs. The first of them, Love Token, relates to the museum’s collection of convict’s ‘love tokens’, which were very often the only thing a convict was able to leave behind before they left for the penal colonies at the far side of the world.
The second of the compositions, Stolen, was inspired by a salvaged gate post that once stood outside a boys’ home in New South Wales. This boys’ home was operational for many decades in the mid-twentieth century and it was a place to which children of Aboriginal heritage were taken, away from their parents and their culture. The survivors of this dismal episode in Australian history are today known as members of the ‘Stolen’ generation, and their experiences are evoked in this song.
The last in this trio of compositions reaches back once again to the earliest days of Australia’s colonial history. It is called ‘Fortunate Wind’ and connects with the one of the anchors on Matthew Flinders’ HMS Investigator. On a dramatic day during Flinders’ epic first circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-2, the ship’s company of the Investigator narrowly avoided shipwreck with the help of a little ‘fortunate wind.’
Slava and Leonard take us back to each of these historical episodes and, from the ABC recording studios in Sydney, they play the songs they inspired.
All of the music that features on this episode of Travels Through Time can be found on the Grigoryan Brothers’ album, This Is Us.
*** Listen to the Podcast ***
Show Notes
Song One: ‘Love Token’ – inspired by the convicts’ love tokens.
Song Two: ‘Stolen’ – inspired by a gate salvaged from a children’s home.
Song Three: ‘Fortunate Wind’ – inspired by an anchor belonging to HMS Investigator
Time Travelling? To 1932 or the 1950s.
People/Social
Presenter: Peter Moore
Guests: The Grigoryan Brothers
Production: Matt Hiley in Sydney / Maria Nolan in London
Podcast partner: Ace Cultural Tours
Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_
About the Grigoryan Brothers
Guitarists, Slava and Leonard Grigoryan are counted amongst the finest musicians of their generation having developed a reputation for enthralling audiences with the energy of their performances and the breadth of their repertoire – embracing genres such as classical, jazz and contemporary music from around the world.
Between them, they have received 4 ARIA awards (Australian Recording Industry Association) and an incredible 24 ARIA Award nominations. As a duo they have recorded 12 albums with the 13th coming out in 2023.
They have been touring internationally since 2003, regularly performing throughout Europe, Asia, Australia and the USA.
National Museum of Australia in Canberra by Jerry Skinner
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