Symbolic gestures are important to Liza Lim. As one of Australia’s most in-demand composers, Lim is on a mission to lift women’s participation in the creation of music. And it starts with ignoring assumptions and claiming the right to occupy space.
Which is why, at her behest, the Sydney Conservatorium of Music commissioned a sculpture bust of Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, the First Nations soprano, composer, actor and newly appointed professor at the University of Sydney’s music faculty. Cheetham Fraillon’s bust is the first of a woman, and joins those of Johannes Brahms, Franz Liszt, Peter Sculthorpe and two of Ludwig van Beethoven, on the shelves in the conservatorium library. Soon the group will be joined by two more: 12th-century Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen, one of the most recorded composers of liturgical music today; and the singer, songwriter and civil rights activist Nina Simone.
