The Composing Women Project with Claire Chase
6pm doors • 7pm show
About
From an exploration of musical memories to a work that draws from the intricate patterns of stuttered speech, MacArthur Fellow and flute virtuoso Claire Chase presents five original pieces from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Composing Women program.
Opening with Bree van Reyk’s A (Real and Imagined) Map of Claire Chase, a solo bass flute composition that traces musical motifs from Chase’s childhood sound memories, and continuing with an excavation of previously unreleased pop songs by Peggy Polias, the Composing Women program concert employs flute, electronics, and vocals to present a kaleidoscopic range of styles displaying the boundless sonic possibilities of the flute.
Join National Sawdust and Claire Chase in a celebration of female composers and see the artist San Francisco Classical Voice calls “one of the world’s foremost performers.”
*This program is sponsored by the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Composing Women program with the generous assistance of APRA AMCOS, and patrons.
Tickets
The Artists
Claire Chase is a soloist, collaborative artist, curator, and advocate for new and experimental music. Over the past decade she has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works for the flute in performances throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and she has championed new music throughout the world by building organizations, forming alliances, pioneering commissioning initiatives, and supporting educational programs that reach new audiences. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012, and in 2017 was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize.
Bree van Reyk is a drummer, percussionist, composer, and sound artist who makes unconventional and tradition-challenging performance works. Her music resides at the intersection of contemporary classical, indie rock, and performance art, and is equally warm-hearted and celebratory, while being focused on issues of equality. Bree has been commissioned by organizations such as Sydney Festival, Sydney Chamber Opera, Ensemble Offspring, Canberra International Music Festival, Marrugeku, Urban Theatre Projects, Performance Space, Sydney Dance Company, fashion designer Bianca Spender, AGNSW, GOMA, and the MCA. Her most recent work with visual artist Lauren Brincat, Molto Echo, for seven drummers in a museum, was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Other recent projects include an homage to pioneering Australian percussionist Peg Mantle, written for the Canberra Youth Orchestra, and an invitational installation performance, Invisible, as Music, commissioned for the Day for Night queer performance art festival at Carriageworks in Sydney.
She created the soundtrack installation for The Pool, Australia’s exhibition at the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 2016. She is enrolled in the DMA program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Georgia Scott is an Australian composer, orchestrator, and arranger, with a passion for music, theater, and film. She is studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as part of the Composing Women Program 2018/19, supported by the Doris Burnett Ford scholarship. She graduated with an honors in Composition from the Royal College of Music, London in 2015. Her compositions have premiered in venues such as the Sydney Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and St Martin-in-the- Fields. She has worked with Moorambilla Voices, Claire Chase, Sydney Chamber Opera, and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, both as a composer and orchestrator. She has worked with the estate of film composer Michael Kamen as an archivist for his scores.
Peggy Polias is a composer and music typesetter based in Sydney. Polias has had works performed by Kammerklang, Sydney Symphony Fellows, Ku-Ring-Gai Philharmonic Orchestra, Halcyon, Chronology Arts, Australian Youth Orchestra, and Canberra International Music Festival. She has recently won a commission from the Riot Ensemble, UK in their open call for scores and is working on new projects for pianist Bernadette Harvey/Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and for Sydney Chamber Opera. In 2015, recordings of her works Electro Fractal Gamelan (2011) and Phlogiston (2014) were released on the digital album BETA by Kammerklang. Together with composer Lisa Cheney, Peggy directs Making Waves, an online listening project focusing on early-career Australian composers. Polias explores the influences of Javanese Gamelan, minimalism, feminism, fractals, and handicrafts in her music, and takes a keen interest in the possibilities for music in the online space. Peggy is enrolled in a DMA at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Brenda Gifford is a Yuin woman, originally from Wreck Bay on the south coast of New South Wales. A composer and classically trained saxophonist, pianist, and teacher, she was a member of the band Mixed Relations with Bart Willoughby from No Fixed Address. She has toured extensively around Australia and internationally to Native American communities and the Pacific Islands. She worked with Kev Carmody on his album Eulogy (for a black person), playing saxophone on the track “Blood Red Rose”. In 2018 she was a participant in the Indigenous Composers Initiative at Australian National University. Brenda has been commissioned by the Canberra International Music Festival for her work Gambambarawaraga (“seasons” in the Dhurga language). She composed Music for the Dreaming, a work tailored for children exploring Dreamtime stories, which received multiple performances at the Sydney Opera House, co-presented by Ensemble Offspring, ABC KIDS Listen, and ABC Classic, and which was subsequently recorded for CD. She has conducted over 100 interviews and oral histories with Aboriginal musicians and has curated notes and blogs for the National Film & Sound Archive, Sounds of Australia (NFSA website) online. She is a current member of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN).
Josephine Macken is a composer, performer, and artist based in Sydney, Australia. Co-founder of SPIRAL Ensemble and the Lost+Sound collective, Josephine is studying a MMus in composition supervised by Liza Lim at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She has recently been commissioned by the ELISION Ensemble and Sydney Chamber Opera and her works have been performed by Mivos Quartet, the SCM Wind Symphony, Onsombel Ensemble, SPIRAL, and Ensemble MUSE. Josephine participated in the 2017 Ensemble Offspring Hatched Voices Program with soprano Jessica Aszodi and embarked on an exchange program with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music at the end of 2017. She has marketed and managed a number of new music showcases in Sydney, including Impartials (2016), the Quintmatics electroacoustic showcase (2016), and Retrospectacles (2017), a curation of installation and performance art.
