Celebrating women in Sydney’s creative fields

Liza Lim

Sydney Conservatorium of Music

Composer Liza Lim has only just run out of room on one hand to count the number of times she has been programmed solely with other women. As a Professor of Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Liza is working to address the serious gender inequity in the music industry. In her 30-year career Liza says she has often been the only woman composer represented on a concert program, a whole festival or season, a panel, or even just in the room. Liza currently leads the ‘Composing Women’ program, which provides significant opportunities and mentoring for exceptional, early-career female composers.

Liza is a highly-acclaimed composer and has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and BBC Symphony. Her own research subjects include ritual and non-Western performance practices as well as ideas around ecological thinking and distributed creativity. This year her opera Tree of Codes will be presented in the US while a new work exploring ecological fragility premieres in Witten and Vienna.

Have you had any significant role models throughout your career?

Liza: I’ve had a number of wonderful mentors – firstly, Rosalind McMillan, my high school music teacher at PLC Melbourne who encouraged me to compose and introduced me to contemporary music as a teenager. Also composition teachers Richard Hames and Riccardo Formosa who provided a strong technical grounding in composition that I carry into my own teaching.

How do you think the creative landscape has changed for women over the past century?

Liza: One issue is that women’s creative work is so often undervalued and then gets lost historically. There definitely have been women composers who were wildly successful in their day and made extremely significant contributions to music – from Hildegard von Bingen in the 12^th Century whose Ordo Virtutum is the oldest surviving morality play, to Renaissance composer Francesca Caccini (1587-1640) who wrote one of the first operas by a woman, or Australia’s own Peggy Glanville-Hicks (1912-1990), who composed a number of operas, did pioneering work with non-Western music and who moved in the most glittering artistic and intellectual circles in the States. I think there’s a connection between protecting the legacy of women’s achievements and improving the conditions for new generations of composers to thrive so that we’re not always re-inventing the wheel and feeling that there are no role models.

Based on your experiences, what advice would you give to women considering pursuing a career in the creative sector?

Liza: Seek out mentors, build community by collaborating with peers, think globally (that’s what the internet is for!), ‘connect the dots’.

If you could put on a parade for International Women’s Day, who would you put on the main float?

Liza: Hard question – so many possibilities! I’d love to see someone like Australian engineer-author-activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied represented on a float – a brilliant, courageous woman of colour who is positive life-force personified. But I’m also seeing incredible moral courage from teenage girls who are forced to become warriors for social justice through horrendous circumstances – Malala, the Palestinian, Ahed Tamimi, and out of the recent Parkland school massacre in Florida, Emma Gonzalez, amongst many others. Something of incredible human historical importance and resonance is being constellated in these young women and I’d want to celebrate them too.