2021/2022

Liza Lim, Ph.D.

Professor of Composition, Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music

Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney

Born in 1966 in Perth, Australia
Studied Music at the University of Queensland

Project

Post-Human Songs for the Anthropocene

My compositional practice focuses on transcultural ideas and collaborative methods invested in the distributed and emergent nature of knowledge and "making." I will work closely with a number of exceptional performers, including violinist Karin Hellqvist, contraforte player Lorelei Dowling, and Berlin-based pianists Tamara Stefanovich and Kirill Gerstein, composing both solo and large-scale works (Piano Concerto for the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Donaueschinger Musiktage 2021 as well as "Fatimah - Jubilation of Flowers," the third part of my Annunciation Triptych for WDR Sinfonieorchester, Acht Brücken Festival 2022). I prioritise embodied knowledges and am developing notions of the "lyric," of "contact noise" and "respiration" for an écriture féminine (Cixous) that writes on, with, and through bodies in order to speculate on music's connections to ecological thinking and more-than-human agencies.
I will also look at the important role of artistic research during a time when the complexities of climate emergencies, global pandemics, and other forms of collapse create cognitive and emotional loads that leave us grasping for new stories to navigate our entanglement with what Anna Tsing and others have dubbed "ghosts and monsters" (Tsing, Swanson, Gan, Bubandt, 2017). I'm intrigued by the ways the stories one tells are ways of knowing that organise the world; the form of an analysis is already an epistemological structure; the beliefs one holds already make their own rules; and so on. Hence, in terms of compositional practice and writing texts, the two parts of my project are speculative attempts to think with and through music to find new ways of "telling," exploring juxtapositions of material realities, sounds, ideas, and stories that are cultural attempts to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Recommended Reading

Lim, Liza. "An Ecology of Time Traces in Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus." Contemporary Music Review 39, no. 5 (2020): 544-563. https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2020.1852800.

Recommended Listening

Lim, Liza. "Ash - Music for the Eremozoic" (2020), for saxophone quartet. YouTube video. Posted by Sigma Project Quartet, March 18, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6EmrHIzp3Y.
-. Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus. Sophie Schafleitner, Lorelei Dowling, Klangforum Wien, Peter Rundel, Stefan Asbury. KAIROS 0015020KAI, 2020, compact disc.

Colloquium, 07.12.2021

Shall we dance? Collaboration, embodiment, ritual

A workshop-discussion of work in progress together with Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist. Centred on a project called “the gap”, we’ll learn some easy steps of a Swedish folk dance, look at sketches, unpack some aspects of notation, and Karin will play some freshly made music. Themes/questions revolve around embodied practice, the tactility of time, ornamentation as desire and lure, memory, repetition, and ritual.