Carl Vine’s impact on Australian musical life was first felt on the dance stage. A composer of more than 25 dance and ballet scores to date, choreography has played a pivotal role in his career – a body of work that has placed Vine as one of the key creators of music for Australian dance.
He was first commissioned as a teenager in 1971 by the West Australian Ballet Company to create electronic music for a show titled Two Short Circuits. In 1975 he moved to Sydney, where he began work as a freelance composer and pianist with a variety of dance companies. In 1978 he became resident composer for the Sydney Dance Company, culminating in the creation of Poppy, based on the life of Jean Cocteau - the first full-length dance work composed, choreographed and designed entirely by Australians.
He spent 1979 in London composing music for new works by choreographers resident with the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and a new work for the Basic Space dance group in Edinburgh. In 1983 he received the Adams Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music for Dance in Australia.
In 1988, Vine’s Legend for orchestra was choreographed by Jacqui Carroll as The Night of the Full Moon for the West Australian Ballet Company with stage design by renowned local artist Robert Juniper. This followed earlier collaborations with Carroll in 1980 (Missing Film for the Australian Dance Theatre), 1983 (a full-length Christmas Carol for the Queensland Ballet) and 1986 (Prologue & Canzona for The Australian Ballet). In 1991 they again collaborated on The Tempest for the Queensland Ballet, a 100-minute full-evening work after Shakespeare’s play, combining electronic music with live orchestral performance. International acclaim followed in 1994, with Glen Tetley’s choreography of Vine’s first and second Symphonies for the National Ballet of Canada under the title Oracle – one of numerous times that Vine’s concert works would inspire choreographers.
Prologue & Canzona would later reappear in one of Vine’s most substantive works for the dance stage, with another major Australian choreographer - Graeme Murphy’s The Silver Rose, commissioned by the Bavarian State Ballet in 2005. The 81-minute work is a full-length ballet celebrating the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a dance reinterpretation of the story of Der Rosenkavalier.
Vine’s score was created from his existing orchestral catalogue, including excerpts from his first Piano Concerto, MicroSymphony, Symphonies 3 and 4.2, Smith’s Alchemy, Descent, Pipe Dreams, and Celebrare Celeberrime. The Australian Ballet remounted the work with Murphy in 2010, presenting it at the Adelaide Festival and in Sydney and Melbourne, with a further revival in 2018. With Murphy he would also create Forty Miles – A River of Dreams for Tasdance, a 21-minute work premiering in 2010 at the Theatre Royal Hobart, based on a string orchestra version of his String Quartet No.5, titled Tribe’s Desire.
Vine’s chamber works, including his celebrated compositions for the piano, have also found their way onto the dance stage. Murphy choreographed The Anne Landa Preludes for the Sydney Dance Company in 2007, as part of Short Stories – Murphy’s valedictory tour. Likewise, Vine’s Inner World for solo cello and pre-recorded sounds was first choreographed by Cathy Marston for The Royal Ballet in 2002, and in 2003 by Philipp Egli for the Tanzcompagnie des Theaters St Gallen.
Vine’s work has percolated through every aspect of Australian dance, finding its way into striking settings and stagings. His Percussion Symphony was taken up by the West Australian Ballet in 2012 for the Perth Festival, choreographed by Terence Kohler for the spectacular Quarry Amphitheatre. The resulting work, Rhetoric, was inspired by online multiplayer role-playing games, and saw the dancers costumed in medieval suits-of-armour, their warring factions in violent, thrilling collision.