BY LAURA BIEMMI
Composer Liza Lim has received the Don Banks Award Award to recognise her outstanding contribution to the Australian and international music communities. She was among eight 2018 Australia Council Awards winners, following in the footsteps of last year’s win for Lyn Williams (read our interview).
With a career spanning more than 30 years, Liza’s music has been performed in festivals all over the world and has been commissioned by major ensembles including the LA Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, and many others. In addition to her work as a composer, Liza is an esteemed academic and teacher who has held positions at the University of Huddersfield and the University of Sydney.
We speak with Liza about her work, the Australian musical landscape, and the significance of the Don Banks Music Award.
Hi Liza, congratulations on winning the 2018 Australia Council Don Banks Award! What does this award mean to you?
It’s a great honour to be recognised by the field like this. I’m also conscious of how few women composers have won this prize: three out of 20 in 35 years, with Ros Bandt and Moya Henderson being the last women so honoured 25 years ago. That’s more than a generation of women composers ‘missing’.
I played Don Banks’ Sonata for Violin and Piano in my final recital at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1996, and many of my early mentors knew him. So, that link to a legacy figure in Australian music makes it all the more meaningful.
Those who receive awards from the Australia Council are awarded on the basis of “outstanding and sustained achievement” in their respective fields. How does one accomplish a career of “outstanding and sustained achievement” in the sometimes-tumultuous music world?
I have to say I had a pretty vague idea of what a ‘career’ in composition would really mean when I was starting out. I think luck plays a big part in the equation – and by luck, I mean opportunities to learn from and be mentored by generous teachers; opportunities to practice one’s craft with patient and enthusiastic performers, and to find advocates in the field.
Early on, what characterised the way I worked as a composer was a collaborative connection to performers. At high school, I was writing music for fellow students, such as the string quartet I played in; and for the singer Deborah Kayser who I subsequently wrote three operas for.
At the VCA in Melbourne, I met many of the musicians that formed the ELISION Ensemble, and it was by growing up musically with them and through making many and varied projects that the path to being a composer, and projecting that work into the world, emerged.
My mantra is: ‘Always to foster those close working relationships in one’s local environment in order to make special things that will then hopefully attract attention more widely’.
In your acceptance speech, you stressed the vital role of organisations such as the Australia Council and the Australian Music Centre in fostering cultural legacies and creative communities. In your view, what would an artistic world look like without these organisations, legacies and communities?
I think states of amnesia reign large in the Australian cultural landscape – we’re really not great at remembering our histories or, let’s say, selective memory is often in play. There tends to be impatience with sustaining institutions and artists over the longer term, so I think anything that helps keep track of cultural legacies is valuable in that you have something to build on rather than having to continually reinvent the wheel.
As a teacher and academic, what do you hope to pass down to students through the “living legacy of knowledge” that has had such an impact on your own work?
By ‘living legacy’, I mean finding deep relationships with and inspiration from ideas from all eras in order to keep them relevant. One thing I’m very interested in is the idea of ‘transmission of knowledge’, not as a kind of static passage of information but as a process of learning in which ideas are reintegrated and remade anew. The emphasis is on dialogue and a co-creative relationship with things in order to really know them in a meaningful way.
At the Australia Council Awards ceremony, your piece Wild Winged One was performed by trumpeter Tristam Williams. What was the meaning behind the choice to have this piece performed at this occasion?
Tristram Williams is one of the most important exponents of trumpet playing internationally, and I’ve been privileged to work with him repeatedly both as a soloist and with the ELISION Ensemble. That solo piece makes up part of my opera The Navigator, which he premiered, and he’s made the solo very much his own. It was great to have him play it in Sydney.
You have said that you are “happy to use the privilege of this prize to make a contribution to shifting some of those barriers in music that women in particular face, both through the art I make and the mentoring I will do”. What can we, as musicians, do in our everyday life to help shift these barriers?
Becoming more aware of the choices we’re making in terms of what we accept as normal in music is probably a general place to start – what kind of music do we play, listen to, use in our teaching, cite in our writing? All of these individual acts reinforce value, authority, and power in the wider world. So we can make a difference by noticing where we put our attention and energies, and by widening what we include.
Holding this kind of awareness is actually quite challenging because unconscious bias is so incredibly strong, no matter who you are. I like to tell the story of how, when blind orchestral auditions were first instituted to counter gender bias, nothing much shifted. It was only when they laid carpet down, so that you couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman walking across the floor, when women started to be appointed in representative numbers. So, we also need to be very thoughtful about how to put in place structures that counter unconscious bias.
We shouldn’t underestimate the positive impact of increasing diversity of representation in all fields, not only because it empowers communities that may not have had much visibility or a voice before, but also because it can vastly enrich the scope of who we are and what we understand ourselves to be in more general terms.
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