Trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and at Melbourne University, LIZA LIM has won numerous Australian awards and grants. She later studied with Ton de Leeuw in Amsterdam and was much influenced by post-Webern European modernists. She found a more individual voice with her chamber opera The Oresteia, a series of "shamanistic possessions" that she calls "memory theater," featuring extended vocal and instrumental techniques. This also demonstrated her interest in the ritualistic aspects of performance, which has been developed more recently in multimedia installations created for specific sites and purposes. She was one of the featured composers at the 2003 Musica Nova Festival in Helsinki, where her music was presented in four concerts together with public forums and a video screening of her Chinese ritual street opera Moon Spirit Feasting (Yuè Lìng Jié). The Los Angeles Philharmonic Association commissioned her Ecstatic Architecture for the Building Music festival at the end of the first season in Walt Disney Concert Hall - Esa-Pekka Salonen led the Philharmonic in the premiere performances in May and June 2004.

09/06