Nine Australian composers given Art Music Fund grants for bold new works

Now in its third year, APRA AMCOS’s Art Music Fund has awarded $100,000 to nine composers to create “new and lasting works that will reach audiences both locally and globally.”

The nine funded projects are:

* Anthony Pateras (Berlin) will come up with a 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 (NS) will create a new work for orchestra as a homage to pioneering female Australian music Peg Mantle.

It is scheduled to be premiered by the Canberra Youth Orchestra at the Canberra International Music Festival in May 2019.

Subsequent performances will be from the Sydney Youth Orchestra and West Australian Youth Orchestra in Gilgandra, Sydney and Perth throughout 2019.

* Connor D’Netto (Qld): Commissioning D’Netto’s third string quartet is to be premiered by the Goldner String Quartet in 2019.

It will 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 in Melbourne.

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 & Tristan Coelho (NSW): The project Other Voices comprises two new electroacoustic works for flute and voice.

Performances are 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.

It will be recorded as video works for exhibition in galleries and online.

* Matt Keegan (NSW): a new work will be created 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.

* Rae Howell (VIC): Bee-Sharp Honeybee is a music-science creation project, developed from recent research of bee buzz frequencies, working in collaboration on a global scale with a bee research lab, beekeepers, scientists, musicians and producers.

It culminates in a 1 hour real-time audio/visual work for live chamber orchestra, electronics, a live stream of bees, and animated visuals developed from the hand-illustrated graphic scores.

John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre stated, “It is gratifying to see such creative diversity represented in the list of recipients of the fund, which reflect the many streams of activity in art music across the cultural sector.

“Such outcomes have also been a characteristic of previous funding rounds, which highlights the need for such support, so congratulations to APRA AMCOS for continuing this initiative, and supporting artists in this way.”

One of the 2018 recipients, Rae Howell, noted, “The Art Music Fund is supporting me to bring an all new composition to life that will reach audiences in Australia and around the world.

“As a previous applicant and first time recipient, I wholeheartedly encourage other composers to continue the work they really believe in.”

In recent months, previous recipients’ funded compositions  by Eve Klein, Lisa Cheney and James Hullick have been performed.

April 29 sees Liza Lim’s Extinction Events & Dawn Chorus have its world premiere in Germany.

2016 recipients were Sandy Evans, Alexander Garsden, Samuel Holloway, Cat Hope, James Hullick, Lisa Illean, Liza Lim, Mark Oliveiro, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Dan Thorpe, Meg Travers and Erkki Veltheim.

2017 Art Music Fund recipients were Natasha Anderson, Newton Armstrong, Lisa Cheney, Erik Griswold, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Eve Klein, Dylan Lardelli, Kate Moore and Eugene Ughetti.