During 2020, as the arts industry was savaged by COVID-19, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) kept its programs going, but the young musicians had to study online from home.

As ANAM reopens its physical doors in 2021, the Academy has today announced a big, bold commissioning project called The ANAM Set, which will help revitalise Australian composition and performance, and forge new collaborative relationships, by pairing each ANAM musician with an Australian composer.

Sixty-seven composers ranging across genres and career stages, from emerging to internationally established, will be commissioned to write a six-minute work for or with each of ANAM’s 67 young virtuoso student musicians. The new compositions will be performed live in the second half of this year. That means 67 works totalling six and a half hours of new Australian music will see the light of day.

James Morley, cellist at the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) with Liza Lim, Professor of Composition and Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Photograph © Pia Johnson

The initiative has been supported by the Federal government’s Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) Fund.

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