| As you all know, the university is planning an arts festival for later this year, |
| and here in the music department we've planned three concerts. |
| These will be public performances, and the programme has just been finalised. |
| The theme of the festival is links between the UK and Australia, |
| and this is reflected in the music: |
| each concert will feature both British and Australian composers. |
| I'll tell you briefly about the Australian music, |
| as you probably won't be familiar with that. |
| The first concert will include music by Liza Lim, |
| who was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1966. |
| As a child, Lim originally learned to play the piano - like so many children - |
| and also the violin. |
| But when she was 11 her teachers encouraged her to start composing. |
| She found this was her real strength, |
| and she studied and later taught composition, |
| both in Australia and in other countries. |
| As a composer, she has received commissions from numerous orchestras, |
| other performers and festivals in several countries. |
| 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: |
| this is featured in a work called The Compass. |
| Her music is very expressive, |
| so although it is complex, |
| it has the power of connecting with audiences and performers alike. |
| In the festival we're going to give a semi-staged performance of The Oresteia. |
| This is an opera in seven parts, |
| based on the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies by Aeschylus. |
| Lim composed this when she was in her mid-20s, |
| and she also wrote the text, along with Barrie Kosky. |
| It's performed by six singers, a dancer, |
| and an orchestra that, as well as standard orchestral instruments, includes electric guitar, |
| and a traditional Turkish stringed instrument. |
| Lim wrote that because the stories in the tragedies are not easy to tell, |
| the sounds she creates are also disturbing, |
| and they include breathing, sobbing, laughing and whistling. |
| 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 Delius. |
| Moving on now to our second concert, |
| this will begin with instrumental music by British composers - Benjamin Britten and Judith Weir. |
| After the interval we'll go to Australia for a piece by Ross Edwards: |
| The Tower of Remoteness. |
| 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. |
| The Tower of Remoteness is scored for piano and clarinet. |
| Edwards says he realised years after writing the piece |
| that he had subconsciously modelled its opening phrase on a bird call. |
| Ross Edwards was born in 1943 in Sydney, Australia, |
| and studied at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music |
| and the universities of Adelaide and Sydney. |
| He's well known in Australia, |
| and in fact he's one of the country's most performed composers. |
| He's written a wide range of music, |
| from symphonies and concertos to some composed specifically for children. |
| Edwards's 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. |
| The last of the three Australian composers to be represented in our festival is Carl Vine. |
| Born in 1954, Vine, like Liza Lim, comes from Perth, Western Australia. |
| He took up the cornet at the age of five, switching to the piano five years later. |
| However, he went to university to study physics, before changing to composition. |
| After graduating he moved to Sydney and worked as a freelance pianist and composer. |
| Before long he had become prominent in Australia as a composer for dance, |
| and in fact has written 25 scores of that type. |
| In our third concert, |
| Vine will be represented by his music for the flag hand-over ceremony of the Olympics held in 1996. |
| This seven-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 Adès. |