Art Music Fund announces 2019 recipients

APRA AMCOS’s Art Music Fund is this year dividing its $100,000 allocation to support nine projects – from concertos to opera to the avant-garde.

The nine are:

* An 80-90-minute outdoors opera by Professor Anne Boyd (NSW) drawing upon materials from 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.

There’ll be a “Two Ways” collaborative partnerships between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal artists as singers, dancers, instrumentalists, filmmakers, sound artists, development of a light show, set and costume design.

* A new work that explores durational process in electro-acoustic composition by Anthea Caddy & Judith Hamann (Vic) and seeks to create a hybrid within compositional practice.

This is 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.

* A twenty-minute trumpet concerto by Dr Eve de Castro-Robinson (NZ) for fellow New Zealander Bede Williams references various urgent calls to demand action for climate change, pairing the braiding of Scottish music with the sonic possibilities of a conch shell..

* A 30-minute, continuous multi-movement work The Five Seasons by Liam Flenady (Qld) 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, will create a 30-minute work which explores the intersection between multiple sound aesthetics, movement, and light.

* A 50-minute electronic composition, Prey Calling by Dr James Rushford (Vic), in partnership with M.E.S.S. and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and 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.  

* The Heart Sutra Project by David Shea & Monica Lim (Vic) 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.

John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre points out, “Themes of place, the environment, and climate change are some of what is reflected in the successful applications, and many other of the applications to this year’s Art Music Fund.

“These are themes that also dominate much of Australia and New Zealand’s social and political agenda, demonstrating that the artform engages with the ‘here and now’ in very direct ways.

“Congratulations to these artists, and to all those who are furthering our artform through their creative work, and thanks to APRA AMCOS for their ongoing investment in commissioning new works in the art music sector.”