We created the Art Music Fund, in partnership with the Australian Music Centre, in recognition of the limited opportunities for art music composers to have new works performed.
For 2021, we granted a total pool of A$50,000 to provide funding for ten composers to create commissioned work that is complemented by an exploitation program.
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.
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 and rock music, especially of commercial importance, nor folk and traditional music.
The Art Music Fund is a big application for a big project, so it’s best to get started as early as possible. Read the requirements thoroughly, and give yourself plenty of time to gather support material.
Applicants must be members of APRA AMCOS. If an application includes additional composers who will be paid a commission fee from the Art Music Fund, they must also be members of APRA AMCOS. You can sign up to become an APRA AMCOS Writer Member.
All Australian composers included in applications must also be financial members of the Australian Music Centre. You can sign up to become a financial member of the Australian Music Centre.
The Art Music Fund application form must be completed online via SmartyGrants.
Applicants need to provide:
Please Note: You may only be a part of one Art Music Fund application per funding round. Previous recipients of the Art Music Fund are not eligible to apply until their previous application has been acquitted.
Your application will be assessed on:
Your application must incorporate both the creation of the composition and subsequent exploitation of it, extending its life and reach. Applicants will be expected to demonstrate partnerships between the composer and ensembles, performers, presenters, producers, recording companies etc.
| 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. |
Art Music Fund recipient Lisa Cheney helps with that first big grant.
Read moreDoes APRA AMCOS offer any awards, grants or competitions?
APRA AMCOS is committed to supporting and celebrating the artistic excellence and commercial success of songwriters and composers across all genres.
There are several programs, grants, awards, competitions to help you build a thriving career in the music industry.
Cameron Lam, APRA AMCOS Art Music Specialist
Email: [email protected]