Mid-way through that year we’d all rather forget – The Notorious 2020 – with the world at a ghostly standstill and an unsettling ‘new normal’ looming over the future, I unsurprisingly found myself in a funk of stubborn writer’s block. Unable to feel much beyond generalised confusion and dread, I reached for my usual creativity defibrillator: music. Since I was a child, music has served as a stimulus for my chosen creative medium, unlocking portals to a subterranean world of emotional material, waiting to be alchemised into sentences. Music has a way of doing that for a lot of people – I tend to think that’s its job. But this time, my usual go-to’s felt worn thin, drained of their battery power from years of overuse and well-milked nostalgia. In the midst of all this, I connected with a stranger over Instagram (for all its ills, the odd, good thing can come of that darned app) – a pianist and composer named Rose Riebl whose page was a serene dreamscape of softly lit images and short clips of her bejewelled hands dancing over piano keys like rapid photonic explosions. We exchanged music and words – her language and mine – and after some time she generously allowed me private access to her then-unreleased album Do Not Move Stones. Tenderly, the clank of old piano bones – deep and supple, sparse and full dripped through my crappy speakers and filled the room with sweetly haunting harmonies until a deluge of lost feelings began to find their way back to my page. I am happily adrift; I am on my way home, were the first words I wrote, because that’s what it felt like. At a time when the experience of beauty for beauty’s sake felt wistfully far away, Riebl’s songs brought me closer to it and served as a reminder that artistic expression is as necessary to the human heart as oxygen.

“I feel like music is really kind of ancient. It’s the oldest thing we know.” Rose is in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia, and oddly enough we’re speaking over the phone, using our voices for the first time in our three years of sporadic written correspondence. A lot has happened in that time. Do Not Move Stones was released at the end of lock-down to the kind of praise it rightly deserves, she’s toured the album internationally playing to packed houses, her and I have indirectly collaborated on three film projects (still without ever speaking), and she’s in the final stages of composing an opera set to be staged early next year. “One of the first things we were talking about in our development [of the opera] was, what’s the sound of the primordial ‘Om’? What’s the first sound that existed in creation, long before humankind – what did that sound like? Because we know a lot about light and dark matter and atoms and space, but what was the music the spheres were giving us?”

For Riebl, music has always felt like this: elemental, instinctive, embedded deep in the grain of her being. It’s what connects her to the raw material of being human – the thread of life that runs through all things. Playing the piano was just something she could always do, as if it took no learning, only remembering. “I guess it’s like swimming or running or walking – it’s so elemental and expressive, you just move through it. I was very lucky to have that,” she tells me. “I remember chatting to my mum about it and I asked her if she ever had to force me to practice and she said, ‘no I really didn’t, you would just do it – you loved it, you’d take yourself to the piano and race through your pieces.’”

Growing up in a musical household likely offered the prime conditions, the ‘nurture’ aspect so to speak, of what she describes as an “intuitive and immediate relationship with the instrument” – but it’s also something more than that, Riebl feels. “It’s DNA. It’s musical language DNA, or something. Some kind of mystical spiritual overlap between us, the language of music and something out in the spheres of space.” Whether or not she is tapping into some kind of cosmic, primordial language and channelling it through piano keys, or just happens to be really good at unearthing and expressing universal themes through sound, the effect is the same. Riebl’s elegantly restrained compositions are in many ways transportive – not to somewhere else necessarily, but to somewhere deep within, long forgotten but closely felt, like revisiting a vaguely familiar place last seen in childhood. Music is her way of storytelling, of describing the universal yet often ineffable experience of being alive. As much as literature and poetry are a wellspring of inspiration for Riebl, musical notes are the true language of her soul. “I’m interested in the quest and the longing, and in the opening of a door and entering a new landscape – that magical travelling through time and space in a way that music can offer. Like, how do you write flight? How do you write the feeling of being able to fly or move through a landscape you’ve never seen before, or existing under a huge moon – those intense life moments that you can feel when you’re in the ocean with phosphorous or plankton, you know those moments that make you go, ‘oh my god’.”

When it comes to the classical arts, rigorous training and technical skills are obviously essential, but it’s this natural ability to tap into feeling that truly defines greatness. One of the songs on the album that quickly became a favourite, Even as the Light Fades, makes me cry when I listen to it no matter where I am or what I’m doing, and I can’t quite say why. “It’s actually meant to be a happy song!” I’m told. “For me it’s about movement; it’s running, it’s the sound of motion, an old train. It’s that desperate desire to get out into a space and into the world and that longing that we all have. Where is that thing? Where is that person? How do we reach for it?” And I realise that’s it, that’s what I’m feeling when I listen to it, and it’s not precisely melancholic. “I think often joy is really close to sadness in music. Mozart is a master at that, there are these devastating moments in his pieces, which are sad but actually in a major key, and they’re more moving because there’s some hope in there. It’s just the seed of life – there’s so much in it, how can it be reduced?”

After spending much of her youth engaged in classical training at the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne, and the prestigious Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, Riebl made the bold decision in her early 20s to close the lid indefinitely on her beloved instrument and follow that inner desire to get out into world. She needed to live a little, to experience the fruits of the ‘seed of life’ on her own terms. She, quite literally, ran off to join the circus in London – “just front of house, I sadly wasn’t a performer.” Her love of story and words compelled her to study literature there, and to travel “widely and wildly” before finally returning years later to her place of origin, the piano, with a fresh perspective and renewed appreciation for her first love. “I came back to composing and that was a massive renaissance, like finally coming home. That feeling of, this is where I was meant to be,” she recalls. “I think that’s a big part of the heroes’ journey – seeing the world through new eyes, or yourself in a different way. There had to be a break. With classical music in particular, you’re so bound up with your teacher and whichever parent, in my case my mum, who was coordinating it all – because you’re like five or six [years old] – so are you doing it for yourself or are you doing it for a parent or a teacher? That becomes totally entwined with the process, and I’m sure it’s the same for ballet dancers and athletes when you start so young. I think it’s really important to then differentiate and go, I’m actually doing this for me.”

It was her older brother Felix who finally convinced her to return to music. Felix Riebl is a solo artist himself, as well as front-man for one of the longest-running multi-platinum bands in Australian history, The Cat Empire. “We were having a chat one night and he was like, ‘what is music to you?’ ‘I dunno’ I replied, ‘how to decode my life and the stars and all the things I don’t understand but I can somehow express in music.’ And he said, ‘cool, you just answered your own question, now get to it.’” Riebl’s way of “decoding the stars” is also her innermost catharsis. Tragically, she lost her younger brother Max, a supremely gifted countertenor, to cancer last year, after which she wrote an entire requiem as a way of processing her grief. “I would not have coped without something to hold onto in that time. The most incredibly painful moments of my whole life have only been truly expressed in music.” As a quiet kid, she was hard to read, but somehow everything she needed to say was divulged when her hands hit the piano keys. “I’d play Bach and Beethoven and these pieces that are about huge life things – I was almost learning about much bigger emotions than a kid can comprehend in language, but I was doing it through music.”

A conversation I often have with artists and fellow writers is around the correlation between emotional pain and heightened creativity. Personally, some of my darkest times have yielded the best work, or at least the most honest work. Even if I’m long through the acute phase of it, the archives remain forever unlocked, and access is always close at hand. I wonder if it’s the same for her. While her songs are certainly not short on uplifting, transcendent moments, many of them seem to have arrived directly from the Land of Tears. What does happiness, or worse, contentedness, which she tells me she’s enjoying a sweet moment of at present, do to her creativity? Is pain a necessary element in the genesis of great artistic work? “Yes, but pain is never that far away from just feeling human. I’m not saying we should all walk around like mopes, I actually clutch on to joy as much as I can. I think it’s something to consciously do, but all of us who write or paint or compose music, we’re alive and therefore we feel that things are not always happy or simple – pain is never far away.” In fact, the greatest challenge of being an artist, she thinks, is to avoid becoming completely overwhelmed by the intensity of emotion that comes with the territory. “Putting your heart into what you do is your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. That fragility is what allows you to write such beautiful words and that fragility is what allows me to write a beautiful melody – that fragility is actually our power, but it’s also the thing that can really knock you down.”

For some artists, once that fragility – that sensitivity – has cut deeply enough, there is no coming back. The agony of criticism, of perceived failure, of having your work misunderstood and your heart trampled on, for many can be fatal to longevity in an artistic profession. But Riebl believes it’s those hopeless moments that truly define who you are as an artist. “To keep working in the face of that voice that says it’s not going to work, this won’t come together, why are you doing this anyway? Or you have a bad meeting and the world falls apart. Trying to stay in the centre of that and just not giving up, I think that’s the hard part because you want to give up, and you’re all alone and you’re pushing this giant boulder up a hill and you think this is never going to work – just continuing to do the work in that time.” For Riebl, that kind of perseverance seems to be paying off. Following the release of Do Not Move Stones, she’s enjoying her pick of creative projects. Alongside the opera commission, she’s currently working on the score for a feature documentary, two short films and her second LP due for release next year. Looking back on that critical moment when she decided to return to music after her adventures abroad, she recalls the words that finally got her over the line. “I was in tears, saying ‘I can’t do it, it’s not going to work’ and Felix told me, ‘what you do now at this moment is the musician you are. It’s not what you do when everyone’s loving you and thinking you’re great, it’s what you do when you think there’s no hope and you just keep doing the work.’”

The real purpose of art is an endlessly debatable and largely subjective thing. The answer lies in how it lands on the individual and the impact it has on a single heart and mind – so, I suppose, there is no single answer, only a kaleidoscope of impressions rendered differently for everyone. Riebl has no definitive response to what purpose music serves in her own life, maybe because she’s so close to it, or maybe because she is it – the portal, the conduit, the human expression of its ancient essence. What she can offer as insight is a quote from Oliver Sacks, one that goes some way to describing in words what she feels about her art form on a deeper level, and why, perhaps, she keeps coming back to it despite those intense moments of doubt and despair that all true artists seem to share. “On my morning bike ride to Battery Park, I heard music as I approached the tip of Manhattan, and then saw a crowd who sat gazing out to sea and listening to a young man playing Bach’s Chaconne in D on his violin. When the music ended and the crowd quietly dispersed, it was clear that the music had brought them some profound consolation, in a way that no words could ever have done. Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional. It has no power to represent anything particular or external, but it has a unique power to express inner states of feeling. Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation.”