Kate Moore has taken out the Matthijs Vermeulen Award while Lachlan Skipworth has won New England Philharmonic’s Call for Scores.

Dutch-Australian composer Kate Moore has been announced as the winner of the Dutch Matthijs Vermeulen Award for her composition The Dam. The work, originally for alto sax, didjeridu, percussion, baritone (or bass) electric guitar, Fender Rhodes piano, soprano, chamber organ, and baroque string quartet, premiered at the 2015 Canberra International Music Festival, but has since been arranged for new instrumentation. The new arrangement was premiered by UK new music ensemble Icebreaker.

^{Kate Moore. Photo © Johan Nieuwenhuize}

“The Dam is based on the rhythms of the sounds made by cicadas, crickets, frogs, birds, flies, spiders and other creatures that inhabit a waterhole in the bush,” Moore wrote in her programme note for the work. “Far away from human intervention, their evening song becomes a great choir joyously singing out into the vast universe. It is possible from far away to hear where the waterhole is without being able to see it and it is also possible to hear the shape of the landscape around it as many tiny creatures create a sonic...