concert music
There is a certain stereotype according to which works by women composers are meant to be calm, static and reflective, at least in comparison with the macho antics of their male contemporaries.
At the time Mary Finsterer began her career as a composer, in the mid-1980s, there were certainly Australian women composers who seemed to embody these more reflective values, but Mary was never one of them: from the start, her music was unabashedly full-on and hyperactive.
Yet there is a certain paradox here. One thinks of certain visual illusions: the whirling car wheel or electric fan whose accumulated speed suddenly makes it seem static, or the hillside stream that seems serene from a distance, but turns out to be chaotic when viewed from close up.
This sort of ‘dialectic’ between extreme speed and stasis is central to Finsterer’s work (consciously so), and the works on Catch offer many different instances of it.”- Richard Toop.