Musica Viva Australia Season Brochure | 2024

Liza Lim Damian Barbeler Judith Nangala Crispin
Musica Viva Australia is passionate about bringing you the
best new Australian music. Learn more about the composers
whose works will be premiered in 2024.
LIZA LIM
Liza Lim is a composer, educator
and researcher whose music
focusses on collaborative
and transcultural practices.
Beauty, rage & noise, ecological
connection, and female spiritual
lineages are at the heart of recent
works such as Sex Magic (2020)
for Claire Chase; the orchestral
cycle, Annunciation Triptych:
Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019–22),
and the piano concerto World as
Lover, World as Self (2021). Her
large-scale cycle Extinction Events
and Dawn Chorus (2018) has
found especially wide resonance
internationally and highlights
ecological listening to more-thanhuman
realms.
Commissioned for Musica Viva
Australia by the Hildegard Project,
supporting female composers.
Liza Lim’s new work will be
premiered by Kirill Gerstein on our
national tour.
Photo by Maria Sturm.
DAMIAN BARBELER
Damian Barbeler is an Australian
composer and multimedia
artist whose works have been
performed and broadcast around
the world. He is recognised for his
lush, emotional creations inspired
by the natural environment.
His work frequently explores
our personal relationship and
connection to the landscape,
through an awakening to elements
of texture, light, and colour. He
often hikes and travels in the bush
for inspiration. Damian regularly
collaborates with colleagues
from diverse fields including film,
architecture, media arts, and
dance, and often incorporates his
own visual, sculptural and lighting
elements in musical projects.
The new work with music by
Damian Barbeler and words
by Judith Nangala Crispin is
commissioned for Musica Viva
Australia by Richard Wilkins and
will be premiered by The Choir of
King’s College, Cambridge on our
national tour.
JUDITH NANGALA CRISPIN
Judith Nangala Crispin is a
Canberra-based poet and visual
artist, with a background in music.
She has published two collections
of poetry, and a book of images
and poems made while living
with the Warlpiri people. She is a
member of Oculi photographic
collective and was Musica Viva
Australia’s Artist in Residence
from 2021. Her work includes
themes of displacement and
identity loss, a reflection on her
own lost Aboriginal ancestry,
but primarily it is centred on
the concept of connection with
Country. She traces her ancestry
to the Bpangerang people of
North-Eastern Victoria and the
NSW Riverina; and to Ghana,
the Ivory Coast, France, Ireland
and Scotland.
Photo by Kerrie Brewer.
Commissions
22