Writer and musician Anna Goldsworthy: ‘I don’t sleep a lot’

The very energetic Anna Goldsworthy is a writer, pianist, teacher, performer, festival director and mother-of-two.

Pianist and writer Anna Goldsworthy. Image by Tricia Watkinson

In your essay, Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom and Misogyny, you laid bare the dilemmas of being female. Do you think this has changed in any way, especially in the context of the #MeToo movement?

Some things have absolutely changed. One thing that’s really extraordinary about this time is how fast things change and how rapidly the zeitgeist can move. The #MeToo movement has afforded a huge amount of auditing of everybody’s history of interactions and we’re still gauging what the legacy of the movement will be. Things do move exponentially quickly for all sorts of reasons and our scramble to keep up with them culturally and sociologically is one of the great challenges of our time.

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Writer’s block is a luxury I can’t really afford. When I had my first child I was finishing my first book and essentially I had 45-minute increments where I could write while he slept and I found that incredibly useful for focusing the mind. There was no time to sit around and channel the muse. It was just a matter of turning up at the page. But the daily discipline was something I carried over from my training as a classical musician.

As well as being a writer, you’re a pianist, teacher, performer and festival director. How do you fit everything in?

I don’t sleep a lot. My kindergarten teacher used to tell me that “a change is as good as a holiday” and perhaps I took that too much to heart. I imagine that if I move from one activity to another it does provide a type of replenishment.

Who did you look up to the most when you first started forging a life in music?

I had a very influential piano teacher from the age of nine, Eleonora Sivan, who absolutely inspired me to become a musician. She was also the inspiration for my first book, Piano Lessons. But when I look back at my childhood there was a huge amount of artistic privilege. My father is also a writer and having his presence in the house and watching the way he went about his writing practice was extremely informative. There I was as this wide-eyed nine-year-old with two very creative adults and it was a privilege to have that sort of ­attention.

What was it like marrying genres and working with such an accomplished group of musicians for the album and subsequent concert, Thirteen Ways to Look at Birds?

I loved that process. I knew we were in very capable hands. Paul Kelly knows how to build a really strong, robust machine of a song and being able to watch his rigour in action as well as his inspiration was quite instructive. It was a great pleasure for me to be in a room full of different musicians where the creativity was bouncing off the walls.

Did any clashes occur during the process?

I think an inevitable clash occurs when you have hot-headed artistic temperaments in the same room, but on the whole it’s been a joyful collaboration.

This year will be your second year as the artistic director of the Coriole Chamber Music Festival. What can attendees expect this year?

This year is going to be very eclectic. It’s called interbellum and it’s based on music from the 1920s, 30s and 40s — the tumultuous decades between the world wars. In some ways those decades speak to me very clearly about our time now. We’re a world in flux, so much is changing so fast, which is so similar to then. There is a wonderful eclecticism in the music of this meeting of the old world with the new.

The Coriole Music Festival will be held on May 16 to 17 in McLaren Vale, South Australia.

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