Award allows music lecturer to take off on 'celestial journey'

Susanne Powell, senior lecturer in the ANU School of Music, has been awarded a major grant to continue her study of the magical celeste keyboard.

Ms Powell has received the artsACT Creative Fellowship for 2012. The $45,000 grant will allow her to broaden and intensify her research on the celeste, a keyboard instrument most often used to herald dream-like or magical scenes.

The fellowship will enable Ms Powell to travel the symphonic world, collaborating with celeste enthusiasts in the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestras, the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras and the London Symphony Orchestra.

Ms Powell also has plans to meet Icelandic pop singer Bjork, who has invented a new type of celeste, combining gamelan and ipad technology.

Ms Powell has recently approached a number of Australian composers to compose chamber music pieces for the celeste and hopes to release a recording in 2013.

Famously introduced by Tchaikovsky in his Nutcracker Suite, the celeste is considered a cross between a piano and a glockenspiel and was invented 125 years ago by Parisian harmonium builder Auguste Mustel.