Liza Lim

Liza Lim (b. 1966, Perth, Australia) is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and the piano concerto World as Lover, World as Self (2021). Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to more-than-human realms.

Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and the JACK Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Berlinerfestspiele, Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals. Awards recognising her wide-ranging career and depth of compositional practice include the Australia Council’s Don Banks Award (2018), the ‘Happy New Ears Prize’ of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation (2021) and the 2022 APRA AMCOS National Luminary Award. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 King’s Birthday honours for her contribution to Australian music. She was DAAD Artist-in-Berlin in 2007-08 and Composer-in-Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2021-22. A founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-2016), she was elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2022.

Liza Lim is currently Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She has led composition masterclasses and summer courses all over the world, eg: Darmstadt, Royaumont, Shanghai, Boston, Viitasaari, Dublin, Banff, as well as given conference keynotes and distinguished guest lectures at Kunstuniversität Graz, Oxford, Harvard, UCSD and Australian National University amongst others. She established the HCR CD label and Divergence Press at the University of Huddersfield where she was Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (2008-2017). She has continually reinvented her compositional language and practice across a substantial output that spans intimate and collaborative instrumental solos, to chamber and orchestral works, to five strikingly different operas. Her catalogue of compositions has been published by Casa Ricordi (Milan, London, Berlin) since 1992. Her music appears on 10 monographic CDs and 26 other discs. Album releases and premieres of her work have consistently appeared on The New Yorker’s annual Notable lists 2013-2021. Her recent 3-CD album of operas and vocal works, ‘Singing in Tongues’ (2021) was celebrated in The New York Times ‘5 Classical Music Albums to Hear Right now’.

Biography taken from composer’s website.
Photo: Maria Sturm