Berlin-based Victorian composer, musician and installation artist Natasha Anderson has been chosen for next year’s Peggy Glanville-Hicks residency.

The prestigious residency in Paddington, Sydney, is a partnership between the Australia Council and the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers’ Trust.

The announcement was made last night in Sydney at the Peggy Glanville-Hicks address, hosted by the New Music Network.  The address was given by conductor and music educator Richard Gill OAM.

Australia Council Director Music Paul Mason said Natasha Anderson was the outstanding candidate in a strong field.

“The Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers’ Trust and the Australia Council are very pleased to be able to offer Natasha Anderson this creative development opportunity. Nastasha’s acceptance of the residency marks her return to Australia after being based overseas for several years,” Mr Mason said.

Australia Council Chief Executive Officer Tony Grybowski said the residency provided an important period of security for composers, particularly those seeking to reconnect with Australia after some time away.

“This residency also provides the recipient with an opportunity to refresh and refocus their work and we’re constantly impressed by how much new work is created during the residency,” Mr Grybowski said.

Ms Anderson said she was “excited, incredulous, grateful and relieved” to be chosen as next year’s resident.

“The sheer foresight and generosity of Peggy Glanville-Hicks in willing her house in this way helps incalculably,” Ms Anderson said.

“Time and space are increasingly precious commodities, so Peggy’s gift of her house, plus the bestowal of a substantial grant, is a practical and extremely generous measure for which I am relieved and grateful.”

Ms Anderson has a packed program to work on during her residency and is looking forward to connecting with musicians in Sydney of diverse and multiple disciplines.

“Being resident in Sydney gives me the time and space to work on large projects with specific Sydney and Australian musicians and allow these projects the chance to develop in a way that would be impossible if not resident there.  Crucially, it also provides the chance to engage with a broad range of the artistic community of Sydney.”

Her projects include a commission from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for a multi-channel sound installation; working with filmmaker Sabina Maselli on a film/multimedia work for Alex Garsden and Rohan Drape’s INLAND series; creating a new audiovisual installation with Darwin-based visual artist Sarah Pirrie; collaborating with Sydney poet and musician Amanda Stewart on recordings and performances; and writing a solo bass clarinet and electronics piece for 2015 Freedman Classical Fellowship recipient Aviva Endean.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers’ Trust Chair Shane Simpson said the residency was given each year either to a young composer with impressive potential or an established composer with a strong track record.

“Peggy bequeathed her house to be a composers’ haven – somewhere they could work with time and space, without having to worry about the rent.  When you look at the achievements of the composers who have had fellowships, you see how wise she was,” Mr Simpson said.

Past residents include Liza Lim, Julian Yu, Mary Finsterer, Andrew Ford, Julian Day, Matthew Hindson, Cat Hope and Elena Kats-Chernin.  The current resident is musician and composer Barney McAll.

In partnership with the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composers’ Trust, the Australia Council has offered the residency through a competitive grant round since 2012.

Applications are encouraged from composers and songwriters of all musical genres and the successful resident is provided with $20,000 to create new work and undertake professional development.

About Natasha Anderson

Natasha Anderson is an Australian composer, musician and installation artist. She makes instrumental, audiovisual and acousmatic works in a variety of forms: solo performance, notated scores, cross-platform collaboration, audiovisual installation and multi-channel diffusion.

Her compositions have been performed throughout Europe, the USA and Australia by Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Chamber Made Opera, Vanessa Tomlinson, Scott Tinkler, Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim, Judith Hamann and Jessica Azsodi. She was a featured composer for the Bionic Ear Institute’s Interior Design project at the Melbourne Arts Centre in 2011, and currently holds two commissions from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra: a work for solo viola, large ensemble & electronics (Soloist/Conductor: Brett Dean) and an 8-channel sound installation.

Natasha co-founded the quintet Thymolphthalein, which premiered at Südwestrundfunk Baden-Baden’s 2009 New Jazz Meeting. This group went on to play major contemporary music festivals throughout Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, France and the Czech Republic from 2012-13.

Her installations have been exhibited at Musique Action (Nancy), Studio 14 (Paris), MONA FOMA (Hobart), NCCA (Darwin), NGV, Gertrude Contemporary, 45 Downstairs, Linden (Melbourne).  She has performed her electro-acoustic recorder works at The Pompidou Centre (Paris), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Strasbourg), Maison Folie (Mons), Festival de Musiques Innovatrices (St-Etienne), Lausanne Underground Film Festival, Gdansk Centre for Contemporary Art, Vivid Festival, Auckland Art Gallery, Liquid Architecture and the Melbourne Festival.

Natasha has worked as a composer for such theatre and dance productions as the Cate Blanchett directed Year Of Magical Thinking with Robin Nevin (STC, 2009), De Quincy Company’s The Stirring (Carriageworks, 2007) as well as for directors Lawrence Strangio and Melanie Beddie and dancer Peter Fraser.

In 2010 she was artist-in-residence at Montalvo Arts Center, California, and in 2014 an Australia Council Project Fellow.

From 2010-11 she was lecturer in Performance and Composition in the School of Art at RMIT University. Since 2014 she has been dividing her time between Berlin and Australia.

For more information, go to: https://www.natashaanderson.net/index.html

About Peggy Glanville-Hicks

Peggy Glanville-Hicks was born in Melbourne in 1912 and died in Sydney in 1990.

She won an international reputation as a composer and music critic and is one of the few women of her time to achieve such distinction.

The majority of her works were written in America between the 1940s and 1960s and many have been recorded, including two of her four operas.  One of those operas, The Transposed Heads, premiered in Louisville in 1954 and New York in 1958.

Her 1963 opera Sappho, recently recorded with an all-star cast (Toccata Classics), is yet to be staged.

The recording of her Sonata for Harp, recorded by Marshall McGuire, won the 1996 APRA award for the most performed contemporary classical composition.

Peggy Glanville-Hicks returned to Australia in the 1970s and became an important figure on the national music scene.

In her will she bequeathed her house as a residence for composers.