Art Music Fund
Supporting new work that is innovative, displays professional compositional craft and represents a benchmark of excellence in its field.
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How it works
We created the Art Music Fund, in partnership with the Australian Music Centre (AMC) and now SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, in recognition of the limited opportunities for art music composers to have new works performed. We strongly encourage the support of these partner organisations, who champion the work of art music composers, by becoming either an AMC Financial Member or a Friend of SOUNZ.
In 2025, 11 composers (nine from Australia, two from New Zealand) received a total pool of A$82,500 to create commissioned work that is complemented by an exploitation program. Each recipient receives a grant of A$7,500.
The fund exists to commission new work that is innovative, displays professional compositional craft and represents a benchmark of excellence in its field.
To be considered, your work must have committed partners to ensure the work is presented multiple times with the intention to create a long artistic life for the work and by extension, you, the composer.
The Art Music Fund is assessed by an external panel of musicians. With an aim to represent a complete view of the industry, we are particularly aware of ensuring the panel of experts includes diverse voices across culture, gender, geography, generation, and genre.
Applicants planning to use of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Māori, Pasifika or other indigenous cultural content (such as language, titles, traditional instrumentation, narratives or themes) from outside their own cultural heritage must supply supporting documentation that they have consulted with the appropriate communities (or mātanga reo / language and cultural advisors) and have obtained their permissions and support to use their cultural content and intellectual property.
The fund supports a wide range of music styles including notated composition; electroacoustic music; improvised music (including innovative, original jazz); sound art; installation sound; multimedia, web and film sound and music; and theatrical, operatic and choreographed music.
As an applicant, you will be asked to explain how your arts practice aligns with the qualities identified in the Art Music Fund (innovation, compositional craft, and excellence), regardless of style.
It is expected that you will collaborate with ensembles, orchestras, producers, recording companies, broadcasters, festivals and other parties to propose the writing of a work that will be guaranteed multiple exposures by way of performances, recordings, broadcasts or digital dissemination.
Please note: The Art Music Fund is not intended to support popular contemporary music, nor folk music.
2025 Art Music Fund Recipients
| 2025 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Biddy Connor | VIC | Song to the Cell transforms an IV machine into an instrument in this intimate performance. A vocalist and a medical device entwine in a unique duet of hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, exploring ideas of healing, dependency and transhuman connection. |
| Cayn Borthwick | VIC | Cryoswell is new multimedia performance exploring climate, data, and sound through immersive sonification. Composed for Rubiks Collective, bespoke ice instruments, surround sound and visuals of glaciers, waves, and surfers, it transforms environmental and human data into a powerful reflection on impermanence, interconnection and the shifting forces of nature. |
| Dylan Lardelli | NZ | The work will be written for Swiss group - Ensemble Mondrian, and will be composed for violin, viola, cello and electronics. The work will call on Dylan's artistic interests of musical imprint and retrieval, and the path of dream, interlinking the unreliability of memory with interrogation into threshold and dream states. |
| Katy Abbott | VIC | Hidden Thoughts: Wild Creature will be a one-performer show composed for cellist Zoe Knighton. Like other works in the Hidden Thoughts Series, Wild Creature uses responses of the public (this time, looking at intuition alongside recent neuro-science research). The work bridges contemporary classical elements with theatrical elements. |
| Leah Curtis | INT | The Forest, for string orchestra (or quintet), will be an immersive new work, evoking ancient forests and shimmering light. Detailed string textures will be deeply anchored, free, wild, and expansive. Unfolding in three parts: Veil of Mist: Walk with Me, Forest Wayfinding: Rain and Petrichor, and Touch at a Distance: Rewilding. |
| Mace Francis | WA | Working with Vaughn McGuire to compose and orchestrate four new works based on and including his lyrics and voice in Noongar language. These lyrics are based on traditional stories as well as modern day stories. These new works will be orchestrated for a jazz orchestra line up and recorded for distribution. |
| Megan Alice Clune | NSW | Megan will create a durational composition that works with the repetition of melodic fragments over extended durations as a guiding compositional principle. She is interested in exploring the chain of references, associations and connections contained within sounds, and how repetition can morph or disrupt those conceptions. |
| Phoebe Bognar | INT | in time explores how we imagine the future amid uncertainty. Structured in five episodes for quartet, text and electronics, this semi-staged work delves into personal aspirations and anxieties about what lies ahead. in time is a piece about thinking out loud, where imagining the future becomes both an act of resilience and a window into personal and collective concerns and hopes. |
| Rafael Karlen | INT | The Dying Art of Discourse is an extended work for jazz orchestra exploring themes of post-truth, increasing polarization, digital hostility, echo chambers and the curation history. The composition will have interstate and international performances in 2026 leading an album release. |
| Tatiana Riabinkina | NZ | Two New Years of Aotearoa is an orchestral work celebrating New Zealand’s cultural diversity through taonga pūoro and cello soloists. Reflecting Matariki and the European New Year, the piece explores dialogue, respect and unity between Māori and Pākehā traditions, culminating in a shared musical journey of friendship and collaboration. |
| Thomas Meadowcroft | INT | Mediums - a new work for the Jack Quartet which will be premiered as part of the string quartet’s 2026-7 season at the The 92NY Center for Culture & Arts in New York City. The work for string quartet and electronics (pre-recorded string synthesisers from the 1970s and 1980s) explores differences between original and copy, the authentic and inauthentic, the real and the imaginary. |
Previous Recipients of the Art Music Fund
| 2024 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Anna Liebziet | VIC | The new music composition weaves into an installation that includes visual elements in five parts: bones, ghosts, bells, bricks, and hair. As a First Nations artist and educator my pedagogical and creative manoeuvre of 'respectful empathy' inspires the music spanning personal and socio-cultural locations. |
| Cameron Deyell | VIC | ECHO will be created in an immersive offshore environment, with the ocean as a collaborator. The electro-acoustic work responds to ecological processes and will unfold through a creative development with movement artists at Dancenorth Australia before becoming a live performance work and an instrumental studio-recorded album. |
| Christine Pan | NSW | ‘The Parts We Give’ (TPWG) is a song-cycle of eight songs exploring the nuanced presentation of love of an immigrant Chinese family residing in Australia. For two voices, piano, and electroacoustics, TPWG will be premiered in Western Sydney with further Australian and international performances to follow in 2025-2026. |
| Dominik Karski | WA | The work will be scored for two double basses and written for ELISION soloists Kathryn Schulmeister and Rohan Dasika. Indivisibility will essentially be about two similar yet distinct voices striving to attain a state of complete, perfect unity and certainty. The inspiration came from the Planck length (the smallest unit of length in quantum physics). |
| Emily Sheppard | TAS | Emily will write a cross-genre suite exploring the wide-ranging myths of sirens. The suite will feature bespoke kelp and eel-skin instruments and marine field recordings, written for the unique sound-world of the Van Diemen’s Fiddles. |
| Eve de Castro-Robinson | NZ | Earth’s eye, for clarinet, violin, viola and cello. The title is from a quote of Thoreau, “A lake is a landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” It is appropriate, given the physical setting of Wanaka and surroundings, and gives scope to look inward, to create a sonic statement of depth, reflectiveness, and vivid colour. |
| James Rushford | VIC | Composing and presenting ‘Love Knots’, a new work for quarter-tone bass flute, contrabass and Lumatone microtonal keyboard, performed by Rebecca Lane, Jon Heilbron and Rushford. It explores the possibility of ‘3D’ harmony through an innovative score system. It will be performed across Europe and Australia in 2025. |
| Mindy Meng Wang / Monica Lim | VIC | Opera for the Dead (OFT) is a multi-artform musical performance for AsiaTOPA 2025, inspired by rituals and beliefs surrounding ancestor worship, death and afterlife in Chinese and Chinese diaspora culture. It combines live music performance , new/digital media and physical installation to create a participatory contemporary experience of grief, reflection and healing process. |
| Nathaniel Otley | NZ | this rising tide, these former wetlands will be a new chamber orchestra work for the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra and the Southbank Sinfonia that explores the ecological and cultural histories of former wetlands areas in both Aotearoa and the UK; finding and voicing how the echoes of these complex histories continue to resonate today. |
| Peter Knight | VIC | Reality Hunger is a suite of compositions for trumpet, electronics, ondes Martenot, and string quartet in collaboration with French ondes Martenot virtuoso, Nadia Ratsimandresy. The compositions will respond to sections of author David Shields’ influential work of literary collage, Reality Hunger, and will incorporate electroacoustic techniques, field recording, traditional scoring, and studio practice. |
| Sia Ahmad | ACT | I will be working on a song cycle for voice, string quartet and electronics to perform live with The Letter String Quartet (TLSQ). Inspired by contemporary classical, spiritual jazz and modern R'n'B forms, this new work explores the theme of gender identity and faith, directly inspired by my lived experience. |
| 2023 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Andrew Ford | NSW | I Sing the Birth will be a piece for treble voices and electric guitar, written for Luminescence Children's Choir, the Flanders Boys Choir, the Estonian TV Girl's Choir and others. It is a Christmas celebration with words ranging from the 15th century to today, and from Europe to Australia. |
| Aviva Endean | VIC | The Cloud Maker will generate a concert length work, inspired by goddesses from Maori, Korean, Nordic, Jewish, Celtic and Filipino cultures. Using the personal and universal themes that arise from these shared stories, The Cloud Maker will develop refined sonic worlds for their improvisations, which capture the magnitude of these archetypal tales. |
| Brooke Green | NSW | Brooke's third great-grandmother spent her last years ‘senile’ at the Newington Asylum for Infirm and Destitute Women. She was transported from Limerick, Ireland to NSW in 1835 for her first offence: stealing calico. When Limerick-based harpsichordist Dr Yonit Kosovske asked Brooke to compose a new work for baroque violin, bass viol and harpsichord, this story came to mind. |
| Connor D'Netto | QLD | In collaboration with Divisi Chamber Singers, pianist Coady Green, and award-winning Australian writer and playwright Maeve Marsden, Connor is adapting stories from Marsden’s 'Queerstories' into a new song-cycle, for eight voices and piano. |
| Elizabeth Jigalin | NSW | 'Earbuds' is a five-movement work composed for five exceptional percussion/flute duos from across Australia and overseas. The work will showcase the unique artistic identities of each ensemble and incorporate them into the work’s character and direction. 'Earbuds' will convey through music the joy, intimacy and dynamism of living music practice, play and experimentation. |
| Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung | VIC | This project speculates a Chinese-Australian sonic history, using experimental archival sound technologies and historical tunings. Composer/erhu player Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung will lead this project with a team of collaborators, reimagining the collection of Chinese musical instruments, recordings and artefacts held at the Golden Dragon Museum in Bendigo. |
| Nadia Freeman | NZ | Nadia Freeman intends to honour her ancestors using electronic instrumental music, live sampling, song and theatre to tell the relatively unknown history of the 60,000 indentured labourers who were taken from India to Fiji by dishonest means and the inhumane conditions that befell them. |
| Netanela Mizrahi | NT | A new work, initially planned between long-term collaborators, Ms Mizrahi and Mr Gurruwiwi, supported by the Darwin Symphony Orchestra and chorale was to build on duo’s success as The Djari Project. In the week prior to the announcement of this commission, Mr Gurruwiwi tragically passed away. That collaboration now becomes an intimate work honouring exchange, loss and regeneration. |
| Salina Fisher | NZ | ‘Papatūānuku’ is a major new work for taonga pūoro and orchestra, in collaboration with Jerome Kavanagh and Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and will be performed 24 August. The piece celebrates the unique voices of taonga pūoro and their deep connection with the natural world, honouring Papatūānuku (earth mother) in interaction with imaginative orchestral textures. |
| Victoria Pham | France/NSW | 'An Old Belief' is a song cycle composed by Victoria Pham for mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean and cellist Daniel Pini. The work will set six of poet Alexander Cigana’s poems to music. 'An Old Belief' will be premiered as part of the 2024 European-Australian Chamber Music Festival (EACHmf Festival) in France. |
| Will Guthrie | France | The project comprises the creation, recording and presentation of new electro-acoustic works for drums, percussion, field recordings and electronics, under the title 'People Pleaser Part III’. These works will be performed live, and will be presented as Guthrie's first completely electro-acoustic live set, combining live drums / percussion and electronics. |
| 2022 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Work |
| Cat Hope | VIC | 'A Slow Emergency' is a large scale work produced by Chamber Made. The work is devised by theatre director Adena Jacobs, composer Cat Hope and Chamber Made Artistic Director Tamara Saulwick, in conversation with a core team of teenage artist/activists as a response to the school climate strike movement. The work is equal parts funeral dirge and shimmering fantasy; choral chaos and dark energy; elation, contemplation and hope. |
| Corrina Bonshek | QLD | 'The space between us…' is a live performance installation for roaming audience and a spatialised ensemble who activate the sonic environment of highly reverberant space. To be presented in Australia in 2022 and in Portugal in 2023 with celebrated percussionist Luis Bittencourt. |
| Hamed Sadeghi | NSW | 'Empty Voices' is a world-class fusion of Persian Classical Music, Jazz and improvisation featuring the tar virtuoso Hamed Sadeghi along with Australian Jazz figures and emerging artists. Inspired by the notion of purity, love, liberty inherent to the Persian Sufism philosophy, a school of thought encompassing mysticism which has often influenced Middle Eastern artists. |
| Kate Milligan | WA | Kate will create a new work for Renaissance flute and electronics. The work will be performed by Australian early music specialist Jonty Coy (NL) on a unique replica of a sixteenth-century flute recently discovered by archaeologists on a Dutch shipwreck. |
| Linda Kouvaras | VIC | The multi-movement 'Herring Island Piano Sonata' will be a collaboration between composer Linda Kouvaras, pianist Coady Green, writer N’arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs of the Boon Wurrung Foundation, narrator Tiriki Onus, Head of the Wilin Centre, University of Melbourne, and sound designer Roger Alsop, in an audio tapestry of piano, soundscape and narration. |
| Maree Sheehan | NZ | The Song(s) of Solomon Project is a multi-disciplinary arts and music project that seeks to explore and respond to the profound and extensive layers of Ralph Hotere’s and Cilla McQueen’s work ‘Song of Solomon’. This project invites 14 Māori composers to create waiata, spoken word, sonic soundscape, rap, poetry to music either individually and or collaboratively to produce and record 14 sonic works that respond to the 14 panels of the ‘Song of Solomon’ for future exhibitions. |
| Paul Clift | Switzerland | Paul's new piece, for flute, clarinet, accordion, violin, cello and electronics, will be entitled 'State of Matter'. It will use hydrophone recordings of the audible, sustained vibrations that occur as icebergs rub against one another or the ocean floor, or as they break apart—so-called “iceberg songs”—as the basis of the electronics and to generate some of the instrumental material. |
| Riki Neihana Gooch | NZ | Riki is working towards developing a vocabulary of conducting directives for an ensemble of Tāonga Pūoro players that is an extension of the ‘Conduction’ method, developed by the late Butch Morris. This methodology is the intersection of composed music and improvisation. The aim is to find a Māori voice within the conduction practice and to document the process by way of a recorded performance. |
| Robert Curgenven | Ireland | New works for pipe organ commissioned by Richard Thomas Foundation (UK) to be realized at the Orgelpark Amsterdam and an electronic version at MONOM Berlin’s 48 speaker spatial soundsystem. These new works will use specific approaches to tonality and overtones focusing on air pressure control, sculpting timbre and tuning (intonation). |
| Ross McHenry | SA | 'For Six Hands and Six Synthesisers' is a major new work by multi-award-winning composer Ross McHenry for three acoustic pianos, six Modular Synthesisers and tape delay. The work uses post-minimalist compositional ideas alongside modular synthesiser compositional concepts to create a unique new chamber music work that will premiere in late 2022. |
| Wally Gunn | VIC | The new work will be a narrative-driven 75-minute oratorio for six voices, based on themes of dystopias, space travel, and evolution. |
| 2021 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded Project |
| Alexandra Spence | NSW | Alexandra will compose, record, release (via Room40) and launch a new album of electroacoustic music, interweaving unusual sound sources with more commonly understood ‘musical’ material e.g. amplified objects, degraded and submerged tape loops, and field recordings, with modular synthesis, clarinet, and voice, resulting in a shifting ambient soundscape of real and imagined places. |
| Alice Chance | NSW | 'Heirloom' is a new art music work in the form of a 'mother-daughter motet', to be created by Sydney-based composer Alice Chance in collaboration with Melbourne-based chamber ensemble Rubiks Collective. The work will receive its premiere as part of the Melbourne Recital Centre’s Local Heroes series. |
| Brenda Gifford | ACT | Brenda's composition Waadhu (Skin), will be a notated piece of chamber small ensemble music combined with improvised elements. Waadhu meaning (Skin) in the Dhurga language of her people. The piece will be a musical response to Brenda's understanding and experience of her Yuin family, relationships, culture and country. |
| Celeste Oram | NZ | Celeste is creating a concert-length experimental music-theatre work for Ensemble Adapter, an Icelandic/German quartet. In sum, the work explores comparative histories of radio in Iceland and Aotearoa New Zealand, dwelling on radio's varying guises as a raw force of nature, a mouthpiece for nation-building, and a site of intimate and personal connection. |
| Ellen Kirkwood | NSW | The Art Music Fund will contribute towards the writing, composing and recording of two 15-minute pieces for contemporary jazz quartet, Underwards. This music will be inspired by stunning locations in Wiradjuri country west of the Blue Mountains, and will also be influenced by Indigenous knowledge of these places, following a consultation with a local Indigenous historian. |
| Mary Rapp | NSW | Mary will film and record three long-form improvisations with established Australian luminaries of improvisation. She will play cello and sing, integrating Pansori (traditional Korean singing), Korean Sinawi (a form of improvising shamanistic ensemble music) and jazz. |
| Nardi Simpson | NSW | -barra is a series of four works centred on the four clan lands of Yuwaalaraay – Kurrajong, Native Orchid, Bimble & Swamp Oak and Lignum countries of the NSW freshwater floodplains. These works, written for and as part of Ensemble Offspring's 2021 First Nations Artist-in-Residence Program will weave interviews with senior clan leaders with choral performances with clan and community members. |
| Noemi Liba Friedman | VIC | Phosphorescence will be a work for viola quartet to be premiered in the USA by New York based viola ensemble Firewood, led by Ralph Farris. The work will explore the tiny particles of light that can naturally occur in ocean water, drawing particularly on two personal experiences Noemi has had with phosphorescence, at Croajinalong National Park, South-Eastern Australia and during a night scuba dive in Thailand. |
| Stephen de Filippo | WA | Stephen and oboist Niamh Dell will work collaboratively to create a new work for oboe and electronics, exploring liminal sounds that are found at the edges of pitch and articulation. Thematically, the work considers a local fascination of mythical creatures, and conceptualises Niamh’s instrument as a beak — its narrow bore both enhancing and restricting performer agency. |
| Tilman Robinson | VIC | "You Never Listen" is an immersive site-responsive electro-acoustic sound work. The audience experiences sound through the ears of others by shifting through 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives of listening. In this immersive work, the audience will be viscerally submerged in the psychological experience of the way others hear, encouraging an empathic response to the experiences of others. |
| 2020 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Kristin Berardi | QLD | The Art Music Fund will allow Kristin to write four pieces, which will be the beginning of a project featuring her compositions and singing, extending from jazz into a more singer-songwriter zone. |
| Leah Blankendaal | SA | Leah will develop a new work for US group Quince Ensemble. Quince are an a cappella group of four treble voices who specialise in new music. This work will examine the movement of bodies through time and how memory is written on, and therefore transforms, the skin. |
| Olivia Davies | WA | 'Gradient', is a 6-hour immersive audiovisual installation featuring hour-long cycles of electroacoustic sound, emerging photographic projections and a live solo double-bell trumpet performer, creating an immersive and contemplative space in which audience members may sit or roam freely. |
| Aviva Endean | VIC | ‘Stranger’ in a major new composition which will develop the use of video as score, and explore its potential for audience engagement. Video is a powerful tool that I have used as a score for audience engagement in two previous short works: ‘A Face Like Yours’ and ‘Song Invitation: Lullaby’. |
| Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey | VIC | 'Witness Stand' is an audio reckoning with site. We sit and pay attention to the here and now, and through a temporal reflection in sound, to the past and future journey of a place and her listeners. 'Witness Stand' as a sound installation places an audience on a series of custom-built seating tiers across a city. |
| Thomas Meadowcroft | Berlin/QLD | Thomas will compose a concert length piece of chamber music for the piano-percussion quartet, 'Yarn/Wire', to be premiered at New York’s renowned Miller Theater as part of their 2020-1 season. Employing a variety of electronic media, the new work explores the archiving of 'muzak' in real time, as well as the temporal conundrum of 'muzak'; namely, it 'goes on forever'. |
| Maria Moles | VIC | Maria's project comprises the creation, presentation and recording of an electroacoustic work that explores combinations of percussion, live processing and electronics (synthesizer, tape loops, and manipulation through the use of time/pitch shifters and filters), inspired by compositional techniques of traditional Kulintang music of the Philippines. |
| Jodi Rose | NSW/Berlin | The 'Global Bridge Symphony' is an evolving composition of bridges around the world, their sounds resonating through the structures, connecting audiences and bridges in a shared listening experience. |
| Jon Rose | NSW | ‘Night Song: Alice Springs’ is a new innovative interspecies work that situates itself between a performance, an installation, and a giant contrapuntal morning chorus - a compression of time and geography into a one-hour sonic experience. |
| 2019 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Professor Anne Boyd | NSW | An 80-90-minute opera project drawing upon materials from the last decades of the life of Olive Muriel Pink (1886-1975), painter, anthropologist, botanist and social activist on behalf of the Warlpiri and Arrernte people of the Alice Springs region. The opera, to be performed outdoors in the garden itself, is based entirely upon local stories and offers significant opportunities for innovative and respectful “Two Ways” collaborative partnerships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists as singers, dancers, instrumentalists, film makers, sound artists, development of a light show, set and costume design. |
| Anthea Caddy & Judith Hamann | VIC | Cellists Anthea Caddy and Judith Hamann, will co-compose a new work that explores durational process in electro-acoustic composition. This project seeks to create a hybrid area within compositional practice by referencing the composers’ new music and sound art backgrounds: one that accesses live interplay between acoustic phenomena and durational listening strategies, alongside immersive electro-acoustic diffusion techniques. |
| Dr Eve de Castro-Robinson | NZ | A twenty-minute trumpet concerto for fellow New Zealander Bede Williams. The proposed work, Clarion, references various urgent calls to demand action for climate change, pairing the braiding of Scottish music with the sonic possibilities of a conch shell. |
| Liam Flenady | QLD | This project centres on the composition of the new 30-minute, continuous multi-movement work The Five Seasons for trombone and percussion, based on themes of geological time, non-Western concepts of time and seasons, and ecological crisis. |
| Kate Neal | VIC | In collaboration with Ensemble Offspring, Dancenorth and electronic composer Grischa Lichtenberger, Kate Neal will create a new 30-minute work which explores the intersection between multiple sound aesthetics, movement, and light. |
| Dr James Rushford | VIC | A new 50-minute electronic composition, Prey Calling, in partnership with M.E.S.S. and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), is inspired by the curious history of the Serge modular synthesiser as a sonic decoy for humpback whales, and will use live electronic predator calls and this historic instrument to make a performance-installation interrogating socio-political issues of language, environment and conservation. |
| David Shea & Monica Lim | VIC | The Heart Sutra Project is a series of compositions for electromagnetic piano, a hybrid piano where magnets are suspended above each piano string, vibrating the string by the electromagnetic field but allowing the note to also be played in a traditional manner. |
| 2018 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Anthony Pateras | Berlin | The composition of a new 50-minute electro-acoustic work entitled Stateless, to be performed throughout 2018/19 in Tarcento, Melbourne, Chicago, Bologna, Zürich, Brussels, Forli, Poitiers, Metz, Geneva and Ljubljana. |
| Bree van Reyk | NSW | The commission of a new work for orchestra as a homage to Peg Mantle, one of Australia’s pioneering women musicians. Premiere performance by the Canberra Youth Orchestra at the Canberra International Music Festival in May 2019, with subsequent performances from the Sydney Youth Orchestra and West Australian Youth Orchestra in Gilgandra, Sydney and Perth throughout 2019. |
| Connor D'Netto | QLD | Commissioning Connor’s third string quartet to be premiered by the Goldner String Quartet in 2019, and to receive its European and American premieres by Modulus Quartet (UK) and the Mivos Quartet (USA), in late 2019 and 2020, to be followed by a studio recording. |
| Elissa Goodrich | VIC | Listen.Now.Again is a new large-scale music installation/live-art performance work, in partnership with St Martin’s Youth Performing Arts Centre. The work takes its inspiration from evolutionary biology and explores climate and science, and features a large live ensemble of professional musicians, operating in collaboration with children-performer-participants. |
| Fiona Hill and Tristan Coelho | NSW | The project Other Voices comprises two new electroacoustic works for flute and voice. Performances confirmed for Ensemble Offsping, Tilde~, Backstage Music and Monash University, and in the US and UK. The works will be enhanced through an innovative Creative Kit, disseminated amongst the teaching community and the tertiary and secondary education sector. |
| Julian Day | NSW/NYC | Games People Play is a set of pieces built on game theory in which performers enact vibrant forms of structural interdependence. The works will individually premiere in New York, Los Angeles, London, Sydney and Melbourne, with various soloists and ensembles, and will be recorded as video works for exhibition in galleries and online. |
| Matt Keegan | NSW | The composition of a new work for The Three Seas, a band that combines Australian jazz musicians with folk musicians from West Bengal, India, to be premiered in Australia and India. The work will be recorded in 2018 and released in 2019. |
| David Shea & Monica Lim | VIC | The Heart Sutra Project is a series of compositions for electromagnetic piano, a hybrid piano where magnets are suspended above each piano string, vibrating the string by the electromagnetic field but allowing the note to also be played in a traditional manner. |
| 2017 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Natasha Anderson | VIC | The composition of Suppression, a 30-minute ensemble work for 12 players and spatialised electronics. To be performed in Australia, the USA and Germany. |
| Newton Armstrong | UK | The composition of a new ensemble work which engages with the complex perceptual dynamics activated by the paintings of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri. The work will be presented in the UK and recorded for release on the Another Timbre label. |
| Lisa Cheney | VIC | The composition of a major new 40 minute operatic work for children, based on Edward Lear’s poem The Owl and the Pussycat. |
| Erik Griswold | QLD | The creation of a new work, Action Music 2, for performances in Australia, USA, Canada, France and Ireland. |
| Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh | US | The composition of a new work for an octet lineup of the ELISION ensemble, to be developed from 2017-2018 for a premiere in early 2019 and subsequent performances in the USA and China. |
| Eve Klein | QLD | Vocal Womb, a sound installation and operatic performance work externalising the hidden, fleshy and deeply personal workings of the voice from inside a singer’s body. Audiences enter a reverberant dome where they manipulate real-time audio and video feeds taken from inside the body of an opera singer who is performing an intimate work composed for the dome. |
| Dylan Lardelli | NZ | The composition of a new work for Musikfabrik. This will be for three musicians, and will include performances in Germany, New Zealand, and Japan. |
| Kate Moore | NSW | The composition of Eximia (Bloodwood), a song cycle about the history, heritage, environment and women’s culture of the lower Hunter Valley using the personified metaphor of Eucalyptus trees native to the Hunter Valley dry sclerophyll forest. It is a 60-minute set of short compositions for two sopranos, violin, percussion, electronics and sound engineer designed for touring in Australia and the USA. |
| Eugene Ughetti | VIC | Polar Force, an immersive live performance combining custom built ice instruments with Antarctic field recordings, set within a chilled inflatable performance space. Polar Force is a phenomenological investigation of extreme wind and temperature through hyper-realistic art. |
| 2016 recipients | ||
|---|---|---|
Composer | Location | Funded project |
| Sandy Evans | NSW | Sandy's Bridge of Dreams is a major international collaborative work for 17-piece big band, Hindustani quartet (voice, harmonium, two tabla players) and saxophone soloist. This 70-minute work celebrates the creative dialogue between an exceptional group of musicians from Australia and India. |
| Alexander Garsden | VIC | Commissioned by Speak Percussion, Alexander Garsden will compose two new works totalling 40 minutes: tolle lege, tolle lege for percussion quartet and electronics, and Alfa Canvas, after Agnes Martin for solo percussion and electronics. |
| Samuel Holloway | NZ | Samuel received funding to write a new work for piano trio, to be performed by NZTrio. |
| Cat Hope, Mark Oliveiro and Meg Travers | WA/NSW | Decibel commissioned three new works by Cat Hope, Mark Oliveiro and Meg Travers for the Electric Concerto program at the Totally Huge New Festival in Western Australia. |
| James Hullick | VIC | CityTopias is a suite of four new works composed by James Hullick for the BOLT Ensemble (octet) that will tour Asia and be presented at JOLT’s Horrific Sapiens Festival in November 2017. |
| Lisa Illean | London/NSW | Lisa received funding to create new work Cantor for an ensemble (soprano and acoustic instruments). |
| Liza Lim | VIC | Liza received a grant to compose a 40 minute work for the internationally renowned Klangforum Wien, scored for 14 musicians. |
| Matthias Schack-Arnott | VIC | Matthias received a grant to create an ambitious new solo percussion work, Field Sever Points, featuring an expansive kinetic percussion instrument. |
| Dan Thorpe | SA | Dan workshopped and premiered [ false cognate ] for bass flute and electric guitar/viola at the highSCORE festival in Pavia, Italy. |
| Erkki Veltheim | VIC | Erkki received funding to compose 60 minute audiovisual work The Ganzfeld. |
