Raelene Burn
The Music Between Us

THE WOMAN AT THE PIANO

If you look at the Dubbo Photo News cover from Festival week, Raelene is exactly where she so often is.

At the piano.

Around her are women who came into the Festival through completely different doors: performers, writers, musicians, facilitators, old friends and new collaborators.

And that image says more about Raelene than a formal biography probably could. She is part of the performance, but she is also helping everybody else get where they need to go.

Some musicians want to be heard. Raelene has spent decades making sure other people are.

LONG BEFORE EVERY WOMAN

This story starts in Dubbo in 1984.

Raelene’s first musical with Wesley House Players was The Music Man. Since then she has sung, acted, played, accompanied and worked as a musical director across Wesley House Players and Dubbo Theatre Company.

While living in Orange she worked as répétiteur for Orange Theatre Company, including a production of Les Misérables.

At Macquarie Conservatorium she is Teaching & Learning Coordinator, piano teacher and accompanist — which means generations of local musicians have known her not only from a stage, but from lessons, rehearsals, exams, eisteddfods and all the unglamorous preparation before a performance becomes possible.

Read Raelene’s MacqCon profile.

SINGING SISTERS

Then there is Cantando Sorelle — literally, “Singing Sisters”.

The MacqCon ladies choir meets on Monday nights. Women are welcome to join and there is no audition.

I love that detail.

Because community music is not only about excellence. It is also about participation — giving people somewhere to put their voice, literally, in the company of other people.

See Cantando Sorelle at Macquarie Conservatorium.

A choir is one of the simplest Better Together ideas there is. Everybody has her own voice. The point is what happens when they use them together.

NO ONE LEFT BEHIND

Her community work is not limited to concert halls.

During COVID, when Dubbo Uniting Church could not gather normally and some members did not have the technology for online worship, Raelene was part of creating Church in a Bag — printed and practical resources delivered to people at home.

At the same time Cantando Sorelle kept meeting on Zoom. Raelene joked that conducting a Zoom choir was rapidly improving her lip-reading skills.

It is a small story beside decades of music, but it tells you something important: find a way for people to remain connected. Do not simply accept that somebody has to miss out.

Read the Church in a Bag story.

THE EVERY WOMAN CHOIR

For the Festival, the choir became something else again.

Raelene guided the Monday-night women through a repertoire that included an abridged I’m Every Woman, Brave, Viva la Vida, Blackbird and From Now On.

The idea was bigger than having a choir perform a song.

Their voices could move through the Festival — from the Opening Welcome Circle to the final celebrations — so that community participation was not a side activity. It became part of the actual sound of the week.

We did not want women only sitting in the audience. We wanted their voices inside the Festival.

RACHAEL + RAELENE

And then Rachael Beck came to Dubbo.

For Inspired by Her, Rachael was bringing songs and stories from her own work into a one-off collaboration with Eleanor Limprecht, Erifili Davies and regional women.

Raelene and Rachael worked together on the songs for the Dubbo performance. Not a nationally recognised performer arriving with something sealed and finished, but two musicians sitting down in this place and shaping what the night needed.

That is the part I care about.

Regional artistry and national artistry were not put on opposite sides of a line. They were put at the same piano.

The exciting thing was never “Rachael Beck came to Dubbo”. It was what happened when Rachael Beck came into the room.

THE CON BEHIND IT

And none of this happens in a vacuum.

Macquarie Conservatorium was not simply a venue on the Festival program.

It was the professional home behind Raelene’s contribution: the rehearsal base, the piano, the women’s choir, the music education infrastructure, the people and the practical support that allowed an idea to become an actual performance.

That matters in regional communities. Big creative moments often look spontaneous from the audience. Usually there is an organisation, a room, equipment, rehearsal time and a handful of people doing very unglamorous work underneath them.

Visit Macquarie Conservatorium.

A COMMUNITY MUSICIAN

The list keeps going because this is what Raelene does.

She and Vivienne Winther rehearsed a Dubbo Youth Chorus that performed onstage with Opera Australia’s touring production of Carmen. She has accompanied school choirs for the Dubbo Eisteddfod. She has taught, rehearsed, played and made performance possible for people at completely different stages of musical life.

In 2019 Dubbo recognised that contribution when Raelene was named Australia Day Cultural Person of the Year.

Read about the Dubbo Youth Chorus performing with Opera Australia.

THE SOUND OF THE FESTIVAL

Photographs became our visual archive. Music became part of the other one.

The choir recordings and music that moved through the Festival also found their way into the promotional pieces we made around it.

So when I go back through the Orana Every Woman YouTube channel, I do not only see promotional videos. I hear another layer of the archive: local women making the sound beneath their own Festival.

Watch the Orana Every Woman video archive.

THE MUSIC BETWEEN US

That is why Raelene belongs in this archive.

Not only because she is an accomplished musician.

Because for decades she has used music as infrastructure for other people — children, singers, actors, choirs, congregations, students, visiting performers and women who simply want to sing on a Monday night.

At Every Woman, that work became audible.

One woman at a piano, a roomful of women finding their voices, and suddenly the Festival had a sound of its own.

— Sharon