Why you should nominate an Australian artist for the Art Music Awards

BY MIRANDA ILCHEF, LEAD WRITER (NSW)

It’s that time of year again: the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards are open for you to nominate an arts worker you admire.

With all the hardship of the past two years, validation and support for the industry can feel a bit thin on the ground. These awards give you the opportunity to amplify all the wonderful music-making that has prevailed in Australia, despite the circumstances.

What are the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards?

Every year, the Australasian Performing Right Association (APRA) and the Australian Music Centre (AMC) present a series of awards to highlight the accomplishments of Australians in the field of art music composition, performance, and education.

I spoke with composer and APRA AMCOS Art Music Lead Cameron Lam who tells me the awards are all about the community.

“It is nominated by the community, it is judged by the community, and it is for the community to lift up their heroes,” Cameron says.

“The main focus of the awards is about extending, supporting, and championing Australian repertoire, whether that’s involving the repertoire in education, in regional practice, or being luminary in your community.”

In this sense, the awards provide an annual opportunity to pause and reflect on the milestones created by Australians and for Australians.

A nomination can help boost Australian artists’ careers

Being nominated for an Art Music Award can have a tremendous effect on the career of the nominee. Composer, guzheng player and 2021 Art Music Awards nominee Mindy Meng Weng highlights the importance of nomination, as “it acknowledges the work of artists and it encourages artists to make more beautiful work in the future”.

“As a migrant musician, it makes me feel I am accepted and included by the Australian music industry when I get nominated,” Mindy said in a statement, drawing upon her own Art Music Award experience in 2021.

Mindy also took on the role of nominator: she nominated Phonetic Orchestra’s Silent Towns, which became the winner of Performance of the Year: Jazz/Improvised Music.

Beyond the career benefits, stories like Mindy’s show us how a nomination can be of immense personal importance. As Cameron adds, the awards “help the artist stand out in a crowd of peers and be acknowledged, which is a huge deal”.

“Even being a finalist is huge. There are so many composers that have really benefited from that visibility in terms of commissioning and programming.”

As musicians and artists, we feed so much off the response and reaction of our audience, and the awards can be an extension of that feeling. To Cameron, the nomination goes beyond a CV spotlight – it provides Australian artists with “that reason to keep doing what you’re doing”.

It’s growing more important to cast your nomination

With restrictions on travel and in-person gatherings plaguing every part of Australia during the past two years, we have truly been thrust into the 21^st Century: the age of Zoom and virtual concert halls. With myriad cancellations or postponed events and performances, it can feel as though there isn’t enough to celebrate.

Yet, if we look closely, Aussie musicians are doing what they have always done – making remarkable music – just in new and different ways.

Composer Liza Lim (featured photo) has won several Art Music Awards, and has herself gone on to nominate a winning artist. In 2021, Liza nominated soprano Deborah Kayser, who then won the National Luminary Award for an Individual.

As Liza pointed out in a statement, “there are plenty of categories in this year’s awards which also accommodate the new ways of doing things in a pandemic”.

“Aren’t we all longing to celebrate the creative brilliance of our art music scene: the performers, composers, and those that advocate for the musical creativity in all areas – those who make, support, organise and educate?”

From delivering online music education to coordinating online performances, artists and musicians have been called on to be more creative and original than ever. The Art Music Awards can help to recognise this innovation and leadership.

Cameron adds that, at the end of the day, “it’s about the industry leaders and community leaders…and we’ve needed those more than ever before over the past two years”.

Here’s who you can vote for

The term ‘art music’ is often used interchangeably with classical music. But it actually covers contemporary classical music, contemporary jazz, sound art, improvised music and experimental music.

In this way, the awards are welcoming of a vast range of arts workers – from educators to chamber music composers and improvisational performers.

Work of the Year awards are available for Choral, Chamber Music, Large Ensemble, Dramatic, Electroacoustic/Sound Art and Jazz categories.

Performance of the Year awards are available in Notated Composition and Jazz/Improvised Music categories.

There are also awards for Excellence in Music Education, Regional Area and Experimental Music.

What about your local arts hero?

The Luminary Awards is a newer category that draws attention to the sustained contribution an individual has made to the industry. Specifically, it gives space to acknowledge “visionary leadership, fearless trailblazing, high-level artistic practice, and the championing of Australian repertoire”.

We’ve all met, watched, or listened to an artist who has moved us. If you have someone in mind who has really made a difference in your neck of the woods, you can nominate them to let the rest of Australia know. Don’t keep it to yourself – give that local artist the chance to be celebrated on a national scale.

Hearing voices from across Australia is important to APRA AMCOS in receiving nominations. Cameron says “nominating is a really wonderful opportunity to make sure that your viewpoint of the industry is part of the collective viewpoint of the industry”.

You can nominate an individual or organisation for a Luminary Award. While there is a specific award category for Excellence in a Regional Area, it’s also worth noting that your nominations for the other categories can come from rural and/or regional places — as long as they’re within your local community. The awards are designed to shine a spotlight on all of Australia, not just the biggest capital cities. 

There are national awards, and a state/territory award. Last year, we saw a spread of Luminary winners from across the industry, including our very own CutCommon founding editor Stephanie Eslake (who won with the Luminary Award for Tasmania), along with Ensemble Offspring for New South Wales, Alex Raineri for Queensland, and Anne Cawrse for South Australia.

This is how you nominate an artist for the Art Music Awards

To vote in the awards, you need to be a member of APRA AMCOS (this usually involves being a composer or author), or be a financial member of the Australian Music Centre.

Aside from that, nominating an artist you admire is a simple matter of providing a bit of information about your nominee, and a short paragraph on why you’ve chosen them.

Now more than ever is the time to raise each other up. As celebrated composer and nominator Liza Lim said in a statement, nominations give you a great opportunity to highlight an artist who has stood out to you.

“Let’s lift up their names and honour their hard work, resilience, their courage, their community spirit and the power of aesthetic expression in telling the most important stories of our lives, our ways of knowing and feeling and being, our griefs and passions.”

Support your peers and local heroes for their musical achievements. Nominations for the APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards close 23 March 5pm AEDT. You can find the full nomination guidelines on the APRA and the AMC websites.

Feeling inspired? Think of an Australian artist you admire, and match them up with an award from the list below!

Images supplied. Featured image: Liza Lim by Harald Hoffmann.