Alfred Hook Lecture Series - The Sentiency Effect: Flow states and Ecology in Music

Professor Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. At this event Professor Lim will reflect on the impact of her work over the last five years at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She will discuss the Sydney Con’s ‘Composing Women’ program drawing connections between processes of cultural change, ecological thinking and music making.

Her recent compositions deal with questions of collaboration with the ‘more than human’; she asks in what ways might we understand notions of sentiency as applied not only to animals, plants and eco-systems but to other ‘non-humans’ such as notation, technologies and music itself? In this talk she speculates on how processes of coming into ‘flow states’ whilst carrying out any kind of activity (eg: playing sport, music, gardening) can create a ‘sentiency effect’ in which do-er and doing are unified and how this can allow us to expand our experiences of interconnection with the living world. This event will also include the world premiere of ‘Calling the Ancestral River’ (2024) performed by the ELISION Ensemble with guest violinist from Sweden, Karin Hellqvist.

Professor Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focuses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works. Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally. Extensively commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and an ARC Laureate Fellow. Lim’s catalogue ranges from solos and chamber music embedded in essential repertoire lists worldwide, to five strikingly different operas. Her music is published by Ricordi Berlin.

Swedish violinist Karin Hellqvist is a performer of cutting-edge music with a profound engagement in the music of today. She is a member of several leading Scandinavian ensembles: Cikada, Oslo Sinfonietta, neoN, Faint Noise and Duo Hellqvist/Amaral as well as commissioning and championing contemporary solo violin repertoire. She has performed at festivals such as Warsaw Autumn, Wittener Tage, Donaueschinger Tage, Münchener Biennale, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, Venezia Biennale, Milano Musica, Ultraschall Berlin, Harvard University, Berliner Philharmonie, Pan Music Festival Seoul and the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt.

ELISION is Australia’s premier new music ensemble, an international ’supergroup’ whose 17-strong membership includes some of the world’s leading musicians. The group has undertaken over fifty tours to twenty-two different countries. ELISION has commissioned over 800 new works, including repertoire classics such as Liza Lim’s Mother Tongue, co-commissioned with the Ensemble Intercontemporain and Festival d’Automne à Paris. Highlight achievements include festival performances at the Opéra National de Paris and the Fomenko Theatre in Moscow; the curation of a concert series at Kings Place London (2009-12); and ensemble residencies at the Universities of Harvard, Stanford, and Huddersfield (2009-24). The group’s discography extends to twenty-two compact discs released on HCR, KAIROS, NEOS, NMC and MODE and reviewed to acclaim in Gramophone, The Wire, New York Times, the Sunday Times, Limelight, and BBC Music Magazine.

Musicians performing are:

• Karin Hellqvist (violin)
• Joshua Hyde (Saxophone)
• Tristram Williams (trumpet)
• Benjamin Marks (trombone)
• Rohan Dasika (double bass)