A new Silo built to be filled with the rudiments of composition in Australia.

“Good bread is a necessity of life, just as music is” – Leta Keens, founder of Silo Collective

A fresh, simple loaf of bread is both modest and mouth-watering. One of the core components of bread is flour, which is kept in silos, huge cylindrical buildings, designed to store basic materials in large quantity. This concept seemed the perfect metaphor to name an initiative by Sydney editor and writer Leta Keens to raise funds for music composition.

Leta hadn’t even thought about commissioning music until she heard Julian Burnside’s Peggy Glanville-Hicks address in 2004. She liked his understated and straightforward approach. He believes that if music is not commissioned, there will be a huge gap in our culture. That resonated with Leta – so, too, did his suggestion that if you couldn’t afford to commission a piece yourself you could club together with a few like-minded people to do so.

At the beginning of 2010 she had coffee with Carl Vine (one of Australia’s great composers, and also the Artistic Director of Musica Viva Australia, the country’s biggest promoter of classical chamber music), to talk about supporting...