Australian composer Liza Lim, who founded the “Composing Women” program at the Sydney Conservatorium. Photograph by Harald Hoffmann.
“As one of Australia’s most in-demand composers, Liza Lim is on a mission to lift women’s participation in the creation of music,” writes Kelly Burke in Thursday’s Guardian (U.K.). “It starts with ignoring assumptions and claiming the right to occupy space…. At her behest, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music commissioned a sculpture bust of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, the First Nations soprano, composer, actor and newly appointed professor at the University of Sydney’s music faculty. Cheetham Fraillon’s bust is the first of a woman, and joins those of Brahms, Liszt, Peter Sculthorpe and two of Beethoven … in the conservatorium library…. ‘There is a woman at the power center of knowledge,’ Lim says. ‘It’s normalizing the presence of women in that space.’ In 2014, research by the musicologist Sally Macarthur found that although women’s participation in music composition … was climbing, only 11% of new works performed in 2013 by a collective of ensembles known as the New Music Network were by female composers…. Very few women were obtaining commissions by orchestras … [Today,] exactly half of the composers commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for its flagship new music program, ‘50 Fanfares,’ are women. The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra will premiere 17 new Australian works in its 2023 season. More than half have been composed by women.”
