The WA composer’s Clarinet Quintet is his second work featured at an International Society for Contemporary Music festival.

Article supplied by Music Australia as part of our classical music partnership.

There continues to be one premier forum by which Australia’s composers are presented to a world audience, and that is the International Society for Contemporary Music’s World Music Days – or World New Music Days as it now tends to be called. This uniquely important festival is held in a different host city each year and showcases new works by composers representing ISCM’s fifty-plus member countries. It is, as John Davis, CEO of the Australian Music Centre observes, “the only event in the world where such a diversity of nationalities gather, and such a diversity of works are presented.”

This year’s World New Music Days has just concluded in Vancouver, Canada, on November 8, and its scale was breathtaking. Each member country was required to submit at least one work, to a maximum of six across 14 different instrumentation categories. So that meant there were over 600 submissions, of which 89 works were performed during the week-long event in 10 venues around Vancouver.