Liza Lim (Compositora) 

Liza Lim (b. 1966, Australia) writes music marked by visceral energy and vibrant colour. A recurring theme in her work is the exploration of the themes of crossing cultural boundaries and of ecstatic transformation. Her music brings together aspects of modernist abstraction with forms of ritual culture drawn from a variety of sources. She counterpoints seemingly opposed pairs of terms such as ´radiance and shadow´, ´violence and meditation´ to describe her musical language.

Her music, which ranges from operatic and orchestral scores to site-specific installations, has been performed by some of the world´s pre-eminent ensembles. Notably, she was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic to write the orchestral work, Ecstatic Architecture, to celebrate the inaugural season of the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004. She was composer-in residence with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005-06. She has received major commissions from the Bavarian Radio and SWR Orchestras, Ensemble musikFabrik & Holland Festival, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble Modern, the Arditti String Quartet (Milano Musica), Salzburg Festival, Lucerne Festival, Festival d´Automne à Paris, WDR Orchestra & Choir and BBC Symphony.

Recent projects include Tongue of the Invisible, based on the Sufi poetry of Hafez, written for jazz pianist Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and musikFabrik which was premiered at the 2011 Holland Festival and will be released on CD by WERGO (2012). She collaborated with artist Olaf Nicolai and Neue VocalSolisten Stuttgart on the project Escalier du Chant, for the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich (Sept-Dec 2011). She is currently working on a new opera Tree of Codes (after Jonathan Safran Foer) commissioned by Ensemble musikFabrik and HELLERAU - Europäisches Zentrum der Künste in co-operation with festival partners.

She has been closely associated with the Australian ELISION Ensemble over twenty years, and they have produced some of her larger scale works. These include her chamber operas,The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (1999) and The Navigator (2008). Her opera The Navigator, directed by Barrie Kosky, had premiere seasons at the 2008 Brisbane and Melbourne Festivals followed by performances at the Chekhov International Theatre Festival in Moscow and at the Festival d´Automne à Paris in 2009.

Lim´s collaborations with Chinese, Japanese and Korean musicians inform her interest in kinaesthetic approaches to performance whereby the physicality of gesture is interrogated as the basis for formulating new approaches to instrumental technique and listening culture. Key publications in this area include three important commissions from the Festival d´Automne à Paris, In the Shadow´s Light (2004), The Quickening (2005) and Mother Tongue (2005).

Her explorations of Australian Aboriginal culture, through research and collaborations with Indigenous artist Judy Watson (Glass House Mountains installation project, 2005) and with Yolngu women elders of the Gumatj clan from Yirrkala, in her role as curator of the music series ´As Night Softly Falls´ for the 2006 Adelaide Festival, has led her to look at aspects of Indigenous aesthetics and non-western epistemologies of time and space in art, music and story-telling.

Awards include the Paul Lowin Prize for orchestral composition, Fromm Foundation Award, Ian Potter Foundation and Australia Council Senior Composer Fellowships, and DAAD as artist-in-residence, Berlin (2007-08). In 2010, she was a guest lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer School and at Voix Nouvelles, Fondation Royaumont. She studied composition with Riccardo Formosa and Richard David Hames in Melbourne, with Ton de Leeuw in
Amsterdam, completed undergraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts, MMus at Melbourne University and PhD from the University of Queensland.

She is Professor of Composition and Director of the Centre for Research in New Music at the University of Huddersfield, UK (since 2008) and was appointed a founding member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne in 2012. Her work is published by Ricordi (Munich, London and Milano) and on CDs with Hat Art, Neos, WERGO, ABC-Classics and Dischi Ricordi.