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As you all know, the university is planning an arts festival for later this year, and here in the music department, we've planned 3 concerts.
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These will be public performances, and the programme has just been finalised.
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The theme of the festival is links between the UK and Australia, and this is reflected in the music.
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Each concert will feature both British and Australian composers.
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I'll tell you briefly about the Australian music, as you probably won't be familiar with that.
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The first concert will include music by Liza Lim, who was born in Perth, Western Australia in 1966.
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As a child, Lim originally learned to play the piano, like so many children, and also the violin.
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But when she was 11, her teachers encouraged her to start composing.
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She found this was her real strength, and she studied and later taught composition both in Australia and in other countries.
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As a composer, she has received commissions from numerous orchestras, other performers, and festivals in several countries.
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Liza Lim's compositions are vibrant and full of energy, And she often explores Asian and Australian Aboriginal cultural sources, including the native instrument, the didgeridoo.
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This is featured in a work called the compass.
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Her music is very expressive.
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So although it is complex, it has the power of connecting with audiences and performers alike.
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In the festival, we're going to give a semi staged performance of the oristia.
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This is an opera in 7 parts, based on the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus.
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Limb composed this when she was in her mid twenties, and she also wrote the text along with Barry Koski.
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It's performed by 6 singers, a dancer, and an orchestra that, as well as standard orchestral instruments, includes electric guitar and a traditional Turkish stringed instrument.
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Lim wrote that because the stories in the tragedies are not easy to tell.
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The sounds she creates are also disturbing, and they include breathing, sobbing, laughing, and whistling.
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The work lasts around 75 minutes, and the rest of the concert will consist of orchestral works by the British composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frederick Delious.
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Moving on now to our second concert.
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This will begin with instrumental music by British composers, Benjamin Britten and Judith Weir.
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After the interval, we'll go to Australia for a piece by Ross Edwards, the tower of remoteness.
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According to Edwards, the inspiration for this piece came from nature, when he was sitting alone in the dry bed of a creek, overshadowed by the leaves of palm trees, listening to the birds and insects.
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The tower of remoteness is scored for piano and clarinet.
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Edward says he realized years after writing the piece that he had subconsciously modeled its opening phrase on a bird call.
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Ross Edwards was born in 1943 in Sydney, Australia, and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the Universities of Adelaide and Sydney.
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He's well known in Australia, and in fact, he's one of the country's most performed composers.
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He's written a wide range of music, from symphonies and concertos, to some composed specifically for children.
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Edwards' music has been described as being deeply connected to Australia, and it can be regarded as a celebration of the diversity of cultures that Australia can be proud of.
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The last of the 3 Australian composers to be represented in our festival is Carl Vine.
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Born in 1954, Vine, like Liza Lim, comes from Perth, Western Australia.
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He took up the cornet at the age of 5, switching to the piano 5 years later.
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However, he went to university to study physics before changing to composition.
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After graduating, he moved to Sydney and worked as a freelance pianist and composer.
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Before long, he had become prominent in Australia as a composer for dance, and in fact has written 25 scores of that type.
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In our 3rd concert, Vine will be represented by his music for the flag handover ceremony of the Olympics held in 1996.
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This 7 minute orchestral piece was, of course, heard by millions of people worldwide, and we'll hear it alongside works written by British composers, Edward Elgar and, more recently, Thomas Ades.