Precarities & opportunities

Many areas of cultural production from design to animation to film need to be reconsidered as a part of the inter-disciplinary approach of both the humanities and creative practice. We open the Symposium with a focus on a creative practice which has always embraced the gesamtkuntswerk: opera. We foreground a researcher connecting contemporary classical music, composition, improvisation, text, sound design, performance, direction and and her interrogation of gender in music. A response from a musicologist launches themes of opportunity and precarity that characterise much of the creative tension and labour in the creative disciplines. 

Keynote speaker

Dr Felicity Wilcox

Dr Felicity Wilcox is an award-winning Australian composer, whose compositions are performed and broadcast in Australia and internationally. She has received commissions for many leading artists and ensembles, was composer and Assistant Music Director for the 2000 Paralympic Games in Sydney, and has composed the soundtracks for over 60 screen productions (as Felicity Fox). Her recent solo albums have received critical acclaim: her chamber opera Threading the Light (Move 2022) received 5-stars from Fine Music Sydney and her collection of chamber works, Uncovered Ground (Move 2021) received two 5-star reviews and was named ‘Pick of the week’ by music critics at the Sydney Morning Herald.

In Australia, Felicity’s works have been selected for international arts festivals including: Sydney Festival, Vivid Sydney, Canberra International Music Festival, and Sydney Mardi Gras Festival; and have been performed in iconic venues such as Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Recital Centre, and Belvoir St Theatre. Internationally her music has been programmed by arts organisations such as: Philadelphia Orchestra, New Music Network (USA), TurnUP Festival (USA), Sadari Theatre (Seoul), Claire Merviel Productions (Paris), Royal College of Music (London), Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester), Pantopia Festival (Berlin), and Balderin Sali (Helsinki), and has featured in international film festivals including Venice, Paris, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo and others. Her film music has been shortlisted for three AFI/AACTA Awards, and an ARIA Award, as well as winning APRA/AGSC Screen Music and a FIFREC Award (France) for Best Music for Film.

Felicity is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound Design at the University of Technology Sydney, and the current recipient of a prestigious Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Government, awarded to conduct research on gender in opera, and to compose a new contemporary chamber opera. She lives on unceded Darug Country in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia.

Response

Professor Sarah Collins FAHA

Sarah Collins is Professor of Musicology, Deputy Head of School (Research) and Chair of Musicology at the University of Western Australia Conservatorium of Music. She has published widely on the relationship between music aesthetics and broader intellectual and political currents in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

Sarah is the author of Lateness and Modernism: Untimely Ideas about Music, Literature and Politics in Interwar Britain (Cambridge UP, 2019), and The Aesthetic Life of Cyril Scott (Boydell, 2013); editor of Music and Victorian Liberalism: Composing the Liberal Subject (Cambridge UP, 2019); and co-editor with Paul Watt and Michael Allis of The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford UP, 2020).

In 2024 Sarah become just the second Australian to win the prestigious Dent Medal, which recognises a significant contribution to the discipline of musicology on an international scale, in the history of the prize.

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