For the last 10 months, Dean Stevenson has descended deep, deep down into the bowels of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art – Hobart’s subterranean gallery dedicated to the dark and the strange – to sit at a piano and write a piece of music from scratch. No one made Stevenson write 150 compositions; if he’s being completely honest, he wanted to see how far he could push himself until he broke. “And it turned out that it was around 130,” he says mildly.
Under the constant gaze of curious art lovers, the 50-year-old composer has spent the last 10 months writing a piece each day, stopping around 4pm when musicians from Tasmania’s Symphony Orchestra arrive to perform whatever he has written, good or bad. When the performance ended, the composition was shelved and Stevenson started all over again.
