Georgia Scott
Biographies
Recipient of the 2021 Australia Council National Arts and Disability Award for Young Artist
Georgia Scott is one of the most outstanding composers of her generation as attested to by numerous high-profile commissions and performances here and internationally.
She is part of the new leadership in Australian art music advocating for gender equity in a field notoriously inhospitable to women and she extends that advocacy to speak up about discrimination around ableism. Georgia, who lives with cerebral palsy, has used her work and artistic practice as a platform to critique ableist norms and offer innovative expressive worlds from more diverse perspectives. She uses music as a tool to lead a broad range of audiences into discussion around the representation and roles for people with disability both in the arts and more broadly.
Her opera, ‘Her Dark Marauder‘, finalist in the 2021 APRA AMC Art Music Awards for Dramatic Work of the Year, uses the aesthetic of the poetry of Sylvia Plath as a lens through which to explore the representation and stigmatisation of women with psychosocial disabilities both onstage and in society. Composed for the Sydney Chamber Opera, each section of this work critiques a different trope commonly employed by writers when devising characters with disabilities for the stage.
Georgia has also used music to engage international audiences in discussions around disability. She has presented her work to students and faculty at both Harvard and Columbia Universities and ‘My3LiNAti0nS’, written for solo flute and performed in New York City in 2019, highlights the notion of disability as a societal construct and celebrates the unique perspective that comes from lived disability.
Georgia also uses her music to call into question the origins of disability, particularly the notion that physical disability is a manifestation of an evil soul, still reinforced in the depiction of so many of the villains of children’s literature. Her orchestral work, ‘The Monstrous Birth of the Woman Machine’ written for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, aims to positively reclaim the title of ‘Monster’, exploring the intersection between human and machine and striving to overturn the 19th-century notions of the origins of disability that still colour societal views to this day.
Georgia has composed for many of Australia’s foremost ensembles and companies and is committed to extending these opportunities to more diverse practitioners through her increasing profile and activism in the art music world. In the last five years, she has worked with Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Chamber Opera, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows, The Australian Ballet, Moorambilla Voices, The Australian World Orchestra, Gondwana Junior and West Australian Youth Orchestra as the recipient of the 2020 Carol Day award. In 2022 she will be working with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Fellows as part of their 50 Fanfares Program, acclaimed Australian cellist Christopher Pidcock, and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra as part of their Australian Composers’ School. Internationally, Georgia has worked with flautist Claire Chase and the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra.
