Liza Lim Appointed To Sydney Conservatorium Of Music

The highly-acclaimed Australian composer Liza Lim has joined the University of Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music to mentor and grow the reputation of women composers in this country.

Liza Lim has been commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, BBC Symphony, and Germany’s WestdeutscherRundfunk and SudwestRundfunk orchestras, and was composer-in-residence with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra from 2005 to 2007.

Professor Lim will work alongside a renowned team of Australian composers including Professor Matthew Hindson, Carl Vine and Dr Paul Stanhope, and will help develop the next edition of the national women composers’ development program set up at the Con last year.

Born in Perth to Chinese parents, Liza Lim went to high school in Melbourne at Presbyterian Ladies College where as a young pianist and violinist she was encouraged by teachers to do composition. She completed a Bachelor of Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and a Master of Music at the University of Melbourne, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland.

She has spent the last nine years working overseas undertaking teaching and research roles in Europe, the USA and Asia, in between numerous commissions. Since 2008 she has worked at the University of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, in the UK as Professor of Composition and Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), where she built up the highly regarded postgraduate program in new music.

Research into cross-cultural practice in music is at the heart of Lim’s compositional work seen by her extensive catalogue with Italian publishing house Casa Ricordi (Milan, London and Berlin) and recordings with Hathut, WERGO, ABC Classics, Neos, and Winter & Winter.

The New Yorker magazine’s music critic Alex Ross wrote in 2014: ‘[Liza Lim] holds a commanding position in international music; her intricately sensuous scores welcomed both at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and at German new-music festivals. Yet she shows an acute sensitivity to the local and particular; to voices on the margins of a smoothly integrated global culture’.

Professor Lim’s appointment at the University of Sydney represents her first major academic role in Australia. She joins another two new composition appointments, digital music experts Dr Benjamin Carey and Dr Daniel Blinkhorn, as well as Dr Jade O’Regan who will teach in the new contemporary music program launched by the Con in 2016.