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Born in Australia in 1966, she
has the degrees of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Queensland), Master
of Music (Melbourne University) and Bachelor of Arts (Victorian College of
the Arts) and has studied composition with Richard Hames, Riccardo Formosa
and Ton de Leeuw. Her work as a composer ranges from concert music to
opera and site-specific installations. She received the coveted Paul Lowin
Prize, Australia’s highest compositional prize (2004, for Ecstatic
Architecture) and the 2002 apra-Australian Music Centre Classical Music
Award for Best Composition. Her honours also include the Young Australian
Creative Fellowship and a two-year Australia Council Fellowship. She has
had repeat commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the bbc Symphony,
the Sydney Symphony, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the
Arditti String Quartet, elision, and the Festival d’Automne in Paris.
She has also made large projects for the Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth
Festivals and for the West and SouthWest German Radio orchestras. In 2003,
she was one of the featured composers at Musica Nova in Helsinki and at
the ‘09(03) Festival’ in New Zealand. Concerts of her music have been
presented by Radio Bremen (1996), WestdeutscherRundfunk (2000) and the
Ensemble für neue Musik in Zürich (1996, 2000).
Her opera Moon Spirit Feasting has enjoyed five seasons of performances at
the 2000 Adelaide Festival, 2001 Melbourne Festival and during 2003 at the
Hebbel Theater Berlin, Zürich Theater Spektakel and Saitama Arts Centre,
Japan. Her music has also been performed at major international festivals
and concert seasons such as Wien Modern, Huddersfield, the Venice
Biennale, Milano Musica, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musikmonat Basel, Ars
Musica in Brussels, ircam, and the Cologne Philharmonic. Collaboration
with other artists has been of central importance to the development of
her compositional style and aesthetic concerns. She has worked extensively
with musicians of the elision Ensemble, as well as with multimedia artists
Domenico de Clario and Judith Wright .
She has been a guest lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1998,
University of California San Diego (Search Events) and Cornell University
in 2000 and ircam Agora Festival 2002 and was lecturer in composition at
Melbourne University in 1991. She is currently composer-in-residence of
the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (2005–07).
Future projects include a work for soprano and 15 instruments to be
premiered by the Ensemble InterContemporain at the Festival d’Automne
2005, a piece for flute (Carin Levine) and saxophone (Timothy O’Dwyer)
with electronics and orchestra for the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra in
Munich for 2006, a work for Klangforum Wien (commissioned by the Salzburg
Festival) and an installation for Brisbane Festival (with Judy Watson).
Selected works: Garden of Earthly Desire for 11 instruments (1988–89),
Voodoo Child for soprano and seven instruments (1989), Diabolical Birds
for six instruments (1990), The Oresteia, opera after Aeschylus
(1991–93), hell for string quartet (1992), Koto for eight instruments
(1993), Bar-do’i-thos-grol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), installation–
performance (1994–95), Street of Crocodiles for nine instruments (1995),
The Alchemical Wedding for chamber orchestra (1996), The Heart’s Ear for
flute, clarinet and string quartet (1997), Yu¸ Lļng Jié (Moon Spirit
Feasting), Chinese ritual street opera (1997–99), Sonorous Bodies,
video-installation with koto (1999), Machine for Contacting the Dead for
27 instruments (1999–2000), The Tree of Life for orchestra (2001),
Ecstatic Architecture for orchestra (2002–04), In the Shadow’s Light
for string quartet (2004), Immer Fliessender (Ever Flowing) for large
orchestra (2004), The Quickening for soprano and qin (2004–05), songs
found in dream for eight performers (2005).
hell was commissioned by Milano Musica and first performed by the Arditti
String Quartet in June 1992.
The word ‘hell’, spelled in the same way as in English, means
‘light, clear’ in German; its derivatives in that language –
‘hellseher’ and ‘hellhörig’ – mean ‘clairvoyant’ and
‘perceptive’ respectively.
In the early 1990s, my compositional process focused on the physicality of
performance, the relationships that exist between the musician’s body
and the instrument. In hell, the music seeks to examine and ‘hear’
ever more finely the interstices of the sounds of contact between
fingertip and string, bodily pressure and velocity transmitted through
vibrating hair and wood, and to compose the behaviour of sounds into
constellations of action. A non-homogeneous approach to string playing
emphasizes the transitional, fragile and unstable tones and the
unpredictable occurrence of extraneous sounds such as harmonics,
distortion and scraping noises.
hell is not a string quartet in the ‘classical’ argumentative
tradition. There is no ‘final solution’ but instead one can draw an
analogy with the puzzles presented by, for instance, those elaborately
decorated Chinese boxes which one twists and turns in all directions
without gaining entry and whose ‘solutions’ turn out to be an elusive
illusion.
Liza Lim
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