GET A LIFE

In concert(o)

Case notes and file notes aren’t the only notes that are of vital importance to some lawyers, discovers Craig Sisterson

Playing classical music can take your mind away from “worrying about niggly little issues” and allow you to come back to work with a fresh perspective, says Crown Law Assistant Crown Counsel Merran Cooke, a member of the Vector Wellington Orchestra and organiser of the recently held ‘Counsel in Concert’ choral and orchestral performance. “I really enjoy the lawyers’ music group,” says Cooke. “It brings me back to when I was doing music as a teenager, and didn’t expect to get paid, just doing it for the pleasure of it.”

First notes
Cooke fell in love with music as a youngster. She played piano, recorder, and harp, but it “was the oboe that won out”. She started playing the “lovely” and relatively “rare” instrument as a 10 year old thanks to the encouragement of her music-loving parents, and fell completely in love with it when she made the Wellington Youth Orchestra four years later. “I really enjoy orchestral playing,” she says. “That was what I really loved, playing in a big group with lots of people. The teamwork aspect is what really appealed, and being part of a really big sound as well.”

Cellist Alison Gordon, a solicitor at Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, has played alongside Cooke at Counsel in Concert the past two years, and is also part of a full orchestra outside of her legal work. She joined the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra’s National Youth Orchestra when she moved to Wellington after completing law and music degrees at the University of Canterbury in 2009. Gordon started playing the cello as a six year old. “My older sister played the violin and I think I was just a bit of a copycat really,” she says. “The cello was sort of the next best thing. It was bigger and it was still a string instrument, so I just fell into it really.”

Passion for playing
She may have just fallen into it to start with, but like Cooke did with the oboe, Gordon soon fell completely in love with the sound and range of the cello. “Because it’s quite a low-sounding instrument, you can express noises similar to a human voice,” she explains. “And so when you are trying to convey the composer’s ideas, you can be very expressive, and there is quite a lot of variety between the higher registers and the lower registers, so you’ve just got a huge range to work with.” Gordon started having lessons with the cello teacher at the University of Canterbury when she was 15, and started her university music degree while she was still at high school. Now, along with the National Youth Orchestra, Gordon also plays in string quartets and other smaller classical musical groups. “That’s the great thing about Wellington, there’s always things going on. There are always people wanting to perform, so it’s quite easy to find other musicians and organise a concert.”

Cooke played with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra “on and off for about 10 or 15 years”, including “really fun” concerts with the likes of singers Cliff Richard, Olivia Newton-John, and Chris de Burgh, in amongst the more traditional orchestral concerts. Now, she really enjoys being a part-time professional musician with the Vector Wellington Orchestra. “We usually do two opera seasons and two ballet seasons a year, plus four or five of our own subscription concerts, and a few outdoor concerts, silent movies, and school concerts. I’m really proud to be part of Vector Wellington Orchestra. The orchestra’s profile and audience numbers have hugely expanded over the last four or five years. The orchestra plays a big role in Wellington’s cultural and artistic community, and that is something that I really enjoy feeling part of… There’s something about the power of 100 people onstage, it’s just so amazing.”

Performance and practising
Cooke says she also really enjoys the balance between music, which “really does use a different part of your brain”, and her career in law. “I can come out of a day at work feeling really tired mentally, but somehow I’ve still got something left to go to a rehearsal.” Playing music energises and helps her deal with work stresses, says Cooke.

She particularly enjoys playing Mozart. “Mozart piano concertos, Mozart choral music, just his glorious parts for the oboe. I think that’s the music I feel most privileged to play.”

Gordon enjoys cello concertos with orchestras and is also partial to “later Romantic works” such as Brahms and Rachmaninov. Recently, she’s played symphonies by the latter with the National Youth Orchestra. Like Cooke, she also really loves the mix of law and classical music in her life. “They seem quite different when you approach them, but there are actually quite a lot of similarities, especially when it comes to performance and that kind of thing, and being able to express emotions, ideas, and concepts that aren’t necessarily your own, but being able to convey them to a wider audience.”

Having to perform music in front of audiences over the past few years has also greatly improved her confidence, says Gordon. “I think it’s been quite good for me, because I was actually quite a shy person until I started playing cello at University, where we were required to perform to the class once a week. So you quickly learned to deal with stage fright and nervousness and that kind of thing, so I got that out of the way before I started working as a lawyer, and that was probably quite helpful.”

NZLawyer magazine, issue 147, 15 October 2010