Caleb Murray grew up in a small town in Northeast Victoria and spent the better part of
his teenage years commuting to Melbourne on weekends for music education. Caleb
studied cello under Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cellist Rohan de Korte before being
accepted into the Australian National Academy of Music in Melbourne. Whilst at ANAM,
Caleb was a semi-finalist in the Concerto Competition and placed first in the Chamber
Music Competition. He also premiered works by Stuart Greenbaum (cello sonata) and
Luke Speedy-Hutton (string trio) during this time.
Caleb spent many years playing in various Australian Youth Orchestra programs,
including international tours and appearances as principal cello. After completing
studies at ANAM, Caleb passed casual auditions with the New Zealand Symphony
Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia, and appeared in performances with the
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. After a
COVID-induced musical hiatus, Caleb became the inaugural recipient of the Patricia H.
Reid Orchestral Fellowship with the Opera Australia Orchestra in Sydney. Caleb spent a
year in Sydney performing operas and ballets before moving to Armidale to pursue a
medical career.
Over the last two years, Caleb has played in many performances around Armidale,
including the 2023 Homestead series and the 2024 Woolshed series through NECOM.
Caleb also is involved with NECOM’s Chamber Music in Schools tours, which provide
music education to geographically disadvantaged primary schools. When he’s not
learning about the human body at Medical School, Caleb teaches a handful of private
students, makes coffee at Double Drop Espresso on weekends and spends his (limited!)
spare time hiking and fly fishing in the high country.
Q&A Interview
Tell us a bit about your time with AYO
My first AYO program must have been 2015. I grew up in Northeast Victoria, in a little country town called Wangaratta. And I travelled to Melbourne every weekend, which is like a 7 or 8 hour round trip, to go and have cello lessons at the time and I was playing with the Melbourne Youth Orchestra that year. And that was the only real orchestra experience I’d had at the time.
As a little 16-year-old I’ve never really had a sense of what it’s actually like to be a musician, so when I auditioned for AYO and you know, I probably played a lot better than I should have, considering I hadn’t done a whole at the time. And I remember thinking, oh, you know, I actually played really well, there’s a chance I might get in. I got a reserve spot for national music camp and then got a call up a couple of weeks later, telling me I had got in, and it was very exciting. And as all the kids from around Australia do, I flew off to Adelaide for NMC and it was just incredible- I remember sitting in the back desk with eight double basses behind me, which I’d never experienced before, and we’d started playing Shostakovich Symphony No.5, which I remember was just my favorite piece at the time- like a lot of other angsty teens! It was just it just blew my mind to be inside that section with a horde of double basses behind you
That was really the turning point for me at that age to decide that I wanted to be a musician and I wanted to pursue music. It was the beginning of a kind of series of really incredible opportunities that I had through AYO, and it was probably one of, if not, the most important piece in my kind of musical education training and as someone who grew up in the country- there were just no other opportunities whatsoever for that sort of thing, particularly at my age. So, I would say it is “life changing” in the most real sense of the word.
Getting those kinds of skills that you learn by playing in orchestras and chamber groups- you can’t learn them in any other way other than just doing it! You actually have to just spend time doing it and AYO provided me with that real-life experience building my technical and orchestral skills to the highest level.
It’s also beautiful now to come full circle and have students doing AYO programs now, which is really special for me.
I think my favorite program was probably the 2019 Chamber Players where we were involved with the Dover String Quartet from the States and we did some fantastic repertoire, playing the Schubert String Quartet in G Major. Actually, one of the violinists in the quartet at the time, Scarlett Gallery and I have now formed a brand-new chamber ensemble here in Armidale! Our name is Ensemble Apsley, and we are mostly comprised of local musicians in Armidale, with about 30% of the group from the QSO in Brisbane. It was born from the idea of becoming a rurally based but very high standard Chamber Orchestra. And part of my reason for coming here to study medicine was wanting to engage with regional musicians and be able to have these opportunities that would have been incredible for me as a young person in the country.
We have built two emerging positions each year to encourage young musicians in the area. This year one of the violinists was India Smith, who is also off to NMC in January 2026!
What advice do you have for young students with passion and talent for music? What is something you wished you were told?
Increasingly in today’s day and age, I don’t think that young people need to have it all sorted as soon as they leave high school. I think music’s one of those careers where I couldn’t have done it the other way around. You know, I couldn’t really have done medicine for five or six years and then decided I wanted to have career in orchestral music. So, I think if getting to that point where you’re deciding what you want to try doing with your life and if you’re like me at the time when music seems like the only good option and it’s just something you’ve always been good at, and you can’t imagine your life without it- go for it! I think we’re quite fortunate in today’s day and age to live in a time where you can go study music and whatever that means. We’re really fortunate that you can change careers now three to four times and there’s much more room to move sideways and to change these days. So, you kind of go well, you know, go – go and do music. It’s not going to cause problems. At the very least, go have some fun of it and go see where it takes you. And if it doesn’t take you to where you wanted to go, then it’s OK to change.
Things that I’ve noticed moving away from music is we have a bit of a stigma around changing careers as musicians. A lot of people struggle with that when they’re moving away because it’s not just like changing career, it’s changing something that you’ve been doing since you were five years old or so. It becomes a part of your identity- being a musician. So, I would just encourage people to be open to change. When change calls you, when change calls you to not be blind to it. Music is still a huge part of my life, and I think it’s the same for anyone who chooses a career after doing music because it’s not like you lose it.
From your perspective, what are some of the challenges emerging classical musicians face in Australia?
I spent a year in 2022 in the Opera Australia Patricia H. Reid Orchestral Fellowship, which was really good fun. It was a great group of people and being able to sit in a pit and be slightly more relaxed than if you’re on stage as a Symphony Orchestra was lots of fun. There were always the kind of subtle jokes that get passed around the group and the slightly tedious Arias, it was nice to have that lightheartedness in a professional organization. On a more serious note, in the kind of career, like classical music, jobs are very hard to come by at the best of time. And at the time, that orchestra had just been through this period of having to let go of musicians during COVID due to funding, and that was really hard. I spent a bit of time talking to the musicians who struggled through this time and left a real mark on the Australian classical music industry. To be in an orchestra for 20 to 40 years and then suddenly be told you don’t have a job anymore and you know it’s not a career where you can walk out of one job and into the next.
Part of my reason for moving away from music was wanting to have a bit more autonomy over my life and just wanting to be able to make choices rather than have choices made for me in some ways. As a musician, you do like 20 or 30 auditions and just hope that you win one. You go ‘Oh, OK. Yep. We’re moving to Britain, moving to Germany…’ When you do win an audition is very exciting, but in some ways, you know, you don’t necessarily want to move to New Zealand- so I think that kind of thing can be really challenging. I think it’s important we talk about those challenges rather than pretend there is not there. And for the amount of skill, training and perseverance there often isn’t enough credit unless you win a job.
How does AYO and your music career feed transferable skills into other fields?
Music is probably (beyond my medical studies at the moment), by far the biggest part of my life. Music – you live and breathe it. You spend every day doing it- music matters in one way or another, and I think what it does is that musicians tend to be much more lateral thinking, creative people. What’s done for me is it’s given me this different way of thinking, where you’re able to kind of think of things that other people perhaps aren’t and from a medical perspective that’s really valuable because people don’t present with straightforward problems. People are complicated, people are not even necessarily typical. And there’s usually like 9 or 10 different things that could be going on. And you have to be able to kind of think sideways and outside the box.
Through my (although) short music career, I spent a lot of time in a very social job in ways that I think people in our fields don’t appreciate- that music is just like one big social experience. AYO Programs, as everyone knows, that just as much a social time as a musical time. People in other careers don’t spend half as much time talking to their colleagues and you know it gives you a really good sense of getting to know lots of different people from different backgrounds. I definitely noticed that so far in the medical field a lot of the students don’t know how to talk to people, and that becomes a problem when 80% of your future job is talking to people and helping them through genuine communication.
From music to medicine, how’s the adjustment been?
It’s, in some ways, much easier than a career in music. Medicine’s a bit of a walk in the park compared to being in a position. It sounds funny but it’s way more straightforward. It’s all about your attitude. The way our course works, we don’t get grades. So, you end up with your lecturers actually saying ‘Don’t shoot for 100%’. Don’t bother because you’re wasting your time. It’s not improving your career options and you’re better off spending that extra time becoming an interesting person rather than becoming like a medical textbook, because it’s going to help you at the end of the day and you don’t need to remember the name of every single antibiotic.
Which composer would you want to invite to a dinner party and why?
Richard Strauss – I would love to know the way his brain works because his scores and music is ridiculously dense in detail. He could somehow fit every single color onto the one painting. But somehow instead of a muddy mess, you get beautiful texture and I don’t know any other composer that does it. I played the Alpine Symphony a while ago and I was just struck by the fact that almost every instrument plays all the time and there’s so much noise, but it doesn’t ever turn into chaos and it’s kind of incredible.
I again want to reiterate how wonderful I think the Australian Youth Orchestra programs are and that we’re very lucky globally to have this organization.
