Lyle Chan celebrates 90s life-saving HIV activism in 90-minutes of music.

This month, an extraordinary string quartet 20 years in the making is being premiered in three cities across Australia. Already hailed by John Corigliano as “a serious and deeply felt work of art born out of a seemingly endless plague”, its composer Lyle Chan explains the origins of this work in some of the darkest days of the late 20th century:

I’m a composer who spent six years as an AIDS activist. I saw AIDS transformed from a frightening, nearly universally fatal illness to what it is today, a hopeful, manageable condition. This happened within a mere two decades of identifying the virus HIV; in the whole history of medicine, there had never been progress made at such speed with a disease so dazzling in its complexity.

My story as an AIDS activist in Sydney began when I was still living in Madison, Wisconsin. My first boyfriend, Geoffrey, whom I met when I was 21 in 1988, was HIV-positive. Mine was the first generation of gay men who never knew a time before AIDS. You had a choice: join the growing grassroots movement against AIDS, or be a bystander,...