Mission Accomplished

Congratulations to Liza Lim on the successful completion of all the works to fulfill her Music Commissions Fellowship, which was awarded in 2007.

The completed works composed for the Fellowship are:

Ochred String 2008, chamber music for oboe, viola, 'cello, double bass

The Four Seasons (after Cy Twombly) 2009, large scale cycle for piano

Pearl, Ochre, Hair String 2009-10, for large orchestra

An additional work, Invisibility 2009 for solo 'cello.

Liza reports that composing these new works have enabled her to extend her practise, in some cases trialling daring new approaches with well-received results.  The pieces have been embraced by the artists for whom they were written and beyond the performances already played, several others are scheduled both in Australia and internationally.  This includes a trio of performances of Pearl, Ochre and Hair String by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra in November 2010, in a program with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: a wonderful pairing of traditional and contemporary classical music.

Click here to view an interview with Liza made for the Festival d'Autonome Paris, in a series about composers and notation.

"The structure of the fellowship support has been of immense value in that I was able to make work of scale...  accompanied by periods of travel and research...

Of particular benefit was the two-year period of the fellowship which allowed time for ideas to develop and percolate in perhaps unforeseen ways.  This aspect of ‘research and development' is I think one of the most valuable and unusual features of such a fellowship scheme as compared to a more straightforward ‘commission' situation.

The freedom of time afforded by the fellowship meant that I was able to direct the pace and directions of my work towards more challenging areas of aesthetic investigation."

Dr Liza Lim, April 2010