Art & Creativity Quote by Graeme Murphy

“SDC has a great reputation for putting live music on stage” sounds like a simple compliment, but it’s really a value statement from someone who’s spent a life negotiating what counts as “alive” in performance. Coming from Graeme Murphy, a dancer and choreographic auteur, the emphasis isn’t on music as background but music as a co-equal body in the room. Live sound changes the physics of movement: tempo breathes, accents sharpen, a phrase can lengthen by a heartbeat. That unpredictability is precisely the point. He’s praising risk.

The phrasing also does quiet cultural work. “Reputation” implies a field with memory and standards, where companies get sorted into those who do the hard, expensive thing and those who settle for convenience. In dance especially, recorded tracks can flatten everything into a fixed grid; live musicians restore friction, dialogue, and the sense that the night could go off-script. Murphy’s line positions SDC as serious, disciplined, and artist-centered without sounding sanctimonious.

There’s a pragmatic subtext, too: live music costs money, rehearsal time, and coordination. Applauding it is a way of defending the infrastructure that makes ambitious work possible - musicians hired, pits filled, conductors consulted - at a moment when arts budgets are often squeezed and “efficient” is treated as synonymous with “good.” Murphy is effectively endorsing a philosophy of liveness: if the stage is where bodies tell truth, then the sound supporting them shouldn’t be canned.