With the impact of covid, Canberra composer Sally Greenaway has lost 99 per cent of her commissioned work and even a casual job at a music retailer. “Lockdown has been very hard,” she tells arts editor HELEN MUSA.

NORMALLY when we catch up with busy Canberra composer Sally Greenaway she’s on the up and up, and with good reason. 

For instance, in 2017 her choral love song “Stay Awhile” came in at number 56 on the ABC Classic FM Top 100 “Love” countdown. In the same year her theatre work “7 Great Inventions of the Modern Industrial Age”, the result of the inaugural Merlyn Myer Composing Women’s Commission, played at The Street.

In 2018, a kids’ play about women in the time of Leonardo da Vinci, written as a commission for Musica Viva, toured the country. 

A year ago she visited the Czech Republic to record a piece with the Brno Philharmonic and, even now, has recordings on the boil of her original compositions with soloists such as Matt Withers and Barbara Jane Gilby. 

But when we meet this time round, it’s a sadder, wiser Greenaway than the ebullient artist we’re used to. Like so many other musicians, COVID-19 has taken the wind from her sails.

Perhaps not entirely. When Canberra-trained pianist Andrew Rumsey began planning a tour to help assist and fundraise for bushfire-affected communities, Greenaway wrote a new piano work for him. 

Then after her great-uncle died, she wrote a solo cello piece in his memory, “Rainwashed Streets”, and completed a new choral work, “If I Could”, for Oriana Chorale. 

And one project has even been fully funded, a recording of her three-movement work for flute, cello, piano, “The Strawberry Thief”. 

“Lockdown has been very hard,” she says. 

“There are bank account fees, rates and direct debit… when you feel like you don’t have a proper job, it’s really hard.” 

As we talk, she remembers she has to contact her health insurance provider to delay. And, as a person who lives mostly on commissions, the idea of living on superannuation is “just laughable… it feels like the end of days”.

Trained in jazz at the ANU School of Music and the Royal College of Music, Greenaway is an accomplished pianist and composer who, if she needed to pay the bills, would in happier times have simply knocked up a film score or a jingle like the one she did a while ago for the government’s end-of-taxation-year commercial. 

But with the impact of covid, she’s lost 99 per cent of her commissioned work and even a casual job at a music retailer, which ended with a covid-related incident. Sadly, that was the one thing that made her feel she had what people outside the arts always call a “real” job. 

“I tried to be a good person and I tried to have a day job,” she says, “but it all took so much out of me.” 

Given her pessimistic view that “the economic bean counters rule everything”, she decided to put figures out to readers of her newsletter so they could get an idea of what the costs of recording were and in doing so found she was in the same boat as many other people – “in that sense, covid is helping,” she jokes.

Months delaying bank interest and household bills mounting while fruitlessly submitting grant applications in an overwhelmed funding situation led to severe depression, so she considered her options. 

A practical person as well as a deep thinker, Greenaway set about building an insulated cold frame for her seedlings and drawing up a plan of action that would include seeking assistance through Armchair Philanthropy (armchairphilanthropy.com), to which she alerted her readers, also suggesting they phone ABC Classic FM asking them to play her music. 

She acknowledges that she is blessed in some ways, with the full support from her husband. 

“I’m lucky. I have my husband,” she says – that’s Peter, who works in IT by day and as a jazz trumpeter by night – “and I’m practising with my veggie garden and sewing a cover for my grand piano”. 

And, although Greenaway has been in a very dark place of late, she’s composing again. 

“I thought that these things were robbing me of my artistic fire, but in fact it has stoked it and I have renewed direction with my composing,” she says.

Sally Greenway’s compositions, recordings and sheet music may be accessed at sallygreenaway.com