Musica Viva’s 2023 FutureMakers Announced

Helen Svoboda, double bass, and Katie Yap, viola, have been announced as Musica Viva Australia’s FutureMakers for 2023.

Helen Svoboda’s work explores the melodic potential of the contemporary double bass. Helen has performed with Cory Smythe, Sebastian Gramss, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Australian Art Orchestra. She was part of both the 2020 Freedman Jazz Fellowship and the 2020/21 Australian Art Orchestra Pathfinders Music Leadership Program and is currently studying a PhD in composition with Cat Hope at Monash University. Her albums include Vegetable Bass (June 2020) and Since Subito (Meatshell, 2021). 

Katie Yap is an outstanding violist who performs both modern and Baroque styles. She is a founding member of prog-Baroque quartet Croissants & Whiskey, the Chrysalis Harp Trio, and crossover folk/Baroque group Wattleseed Ensemble. Katie has become known for her curation and project management, and is Artistic Director of the 3MBS women-in-music festival Music, She Wrote, and of Wattleseed Ensemble. Katie plays regularly with Australia’s finest ensembles
including the Australian World Orchestra, Australian Chamber Orchestra, Van Diemen’s Band,
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, and has performed
with the Academy of Ancient Music (UK).

MVA’s Artistic Director Paul Kildea says there are two qualities he seeks in the young musicians selected to be mentored by Musica Viva Australia as its FutureMakers. “A certain fearlessness and widespread peer respect. Both Helen and Katie have these qualities in spades. It is a delight and privilege to plot and plan with them their emerging careers, conscious that these plans will have a huge impact on Australia’s cultural landscape for decades to come.”

Established in 2015, Musica Viva Australia’s two-year FutureMakers program supports its artists through their creation of an ambitious music-centred performance project. This year’s much anticipated The Cage Project, to be performed at the Perth and Adelaide Festivals early next year, comes from the creative minds of FutureMakers alumnus Matthias Schack-Arnott, and Paul Kildea, where they’ll present a massive kinetic sound sculpture that floats above a piano for John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes. 

Other notable alumni include trailblazers for Australian wind music Arcadia Winds who are touring with MVA in regional NSW in 2023, pianist Aura Go, who who performs in a national tour of MVA’s Chopin’s Piano in 2023, and composer and violist Matt Laing, whose piece Little Cataclysms was heard in MVA concerts around Australia in 2022, premiered by the ZEN Trio.

Paul Kildea talks about Music Viva’s 2023 program.