Composer, sound artist, performer and scholar Dr Ros Bandt will receive the Richard Gill Award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music at this year’s Art Music Awards, APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre have announced. The award will be presented during a virtual ceremony this year, streamed on YouTube on September 8.

Ros Bandt playing the tarhu. Photo supplied

“I am honoured and privileged to receive this award. It belongs to all Australians, old and new, who have dared to ‘sound spaces’ together in this ancient, sung land,” Bandt said. “The acoustic resonance of all we do is a barometer of Australian culture, presences, absences, reaching back into the dreamtime, an evolving consciousness of deep time. Let’s keep divining a new uncharted music together, courageously weaving stories and songs of difference as they evolve through compassion and understanding, listening to each other and being guided by the ancient wisdom of Indigenous elders on whose land we are living. I am proud to live in a country where Fanny Cochrane Smith led the way forward, recording her Tasmanian songs in language as early as 1903, on a wax cylinder.”

Bandt’s...