Anne Boyd

She held posts at the University of Sussex (1972–77) and at the University of Hong Kong, where she was founding Head of the Department of Music (1981–1990). She became the first Australian and the first woman appointed Professor of Music at the University of Sydney, her research turning on landscape and on Aboriginal and Asian traditions in Australian composition. A collaborative ‘two ways’ trilogy of music-theatre works on Australian women who worked closely with Aboriginal people (Daisy Bates, Olive Pink and Annie Lock) has been a later focus.

Her fight to keep the music department alive after the Sydney Conservatorium’s amalgamation with the University of Sydney (1989) drew international notice through the Connolly/Anderson award-winning feature documentary Facing the Music (2001). The Department of Music, now the Arts Music Unit of the Conservatorium, remains on the main campus and continues to thrive.

Born in 1946, she wrote her first pieces as a child on a remote Outback sheep station in Central Queensland, learning music from ABC Radio (especially The Children’s Hour’s Mr Melody Man) and a recorder book from her sister Helen. Later a flautist, she studied with Victor McMahon at the Sydney Conservatorium (1960–64), took Music in the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts (1963–67), and from 1963 worked with Peter Sculthorpe, who remained her closest musical friend. Through him she inherited a lifelong fascination with South-East Asian cultures, above all Japan and Bali; she regards Japanese court music as a seminal influence and the closest musical image of the Outback of her childhood.

She treats composing as essentially spiritual and is drawn to music as meditation—a means of changing states of consciousness—grounded in the meeting of Christian love and Buddhist silence. Later work also explores Christian mysticism and Aboriginal animistic belief, notably in the opera Daisy Bates at Ooldea (2012).

Best-known scores include the choral As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams (1975) and the solo-piano meditation Angklung (1974), one of several pieces for Roger Woodward that anticipated musical minimalism. Others for him include As it leaves the bell (1973), Book of the Bells I–III (1980/98) and the song cycle Meditations on a Chinese Character (1996). Kabarli (Dawn), a test piece for the 2012 Sydney International Piano Competition, is dedicated to ‘Roger on his 70th Birthday’.

Much-played flute-and-piano works include Goldfish Through Summer Rain (1979), Red Sun Chill Wind (1980), Cloudy Mountain (1981) and Bali Moods I (1987) and II (1988), some later arranged for other combinations including shakuhachi and harp. Later commissions include Ganba for baritone saxophone and piano (2011) and String Quartet No. 3 (2015) for the Huntington Festival, a memorial to Sculthorpe.

Her music is published by Faber Music (London) and the University of York Music Press. In 1997 ABC Classics issued a disc devoted to her work, Meditations on a Chinese Character, with royalties directed to the Australian Women’s Music Fund; in 2000 a further portrait disc appeared as Crossing a Bridge of Dreams (TP127).

She was appointed AM in the Order of Australia in 1996, received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of York in 2003, the Distinguished Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA–AMC Classical Music Awards in 2005, and the 2014 Sir Bernard Heinze Award for service to music in Australia.