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Q: Hear Her Now spans more than 900 years of repertoire alongside four new commissions by Western Australian composers. How do you bring medieval and early works into conversation with contemporary WA music, and what connects these voices across nearly a millennium?

A: The starting point for Hear Her Now was always the music itself: what speaks to us today, what belongs together, and what kind of conversation can happen when works written centuries apart share a program.

Once you start looking deeply, the idea that music by women is a small or specialised field falls apart very quickly. There is an extraordinary body of work across centuries, countries and musical traditions. The challenge was not finding enough music; it was choosing from so much of it.

As I gathered shortlists, themes began to emerge. Our opening concert, Homegrown, is devoted entirely to music by Western Australian women, bringing together established composers, community songwriters and a new generation of WA voices. Works featuring voice, woodwinds and organ became Air and Chamber, while uplifting and anthemic choices found their place in the closing concert, Hear Us Roar.

The most significant thread is presence. These women were composing, creating and responding to the world around them all along. Some had extraordinary careers in their lifetimes; others disappeared from the repertoire despite writing remarkable music. We place those works beside music being written here in Western Australia now. The four new WA works belong to the same continuum: celebrating contemporary music, recovering music from the past, and contributing to what comes next.

Q: Wheatbelt songwriters Jan Smith and Kay Weaver came to Mirabilis through a community songwriting project and now appear alongside established chamber musicians. How do you foster a genuine two-way exchange between regional community writers and professional players?

A: Jan Smith and Kay Weaver came to Mirabilis through our Wheatbelt Song Project in Narrogin and Wagin, and their involvement captures something very important about how I want Mirabilis to work.

I am less interested in a model where the professional musician arrives as the expert and everybody else receives the knowledge. We bring our professional skills to the room, but the exchange goes both ways.

In the Wheatbelt project, we worked with women of different generations and backgrounds who had stories they wanted to tell through music. Our role was to help them develop their ideas without taking ownership of the songs. They brought lived experience, language, memories and connections to people and place; we brought skills in composition, arrangement, performance and shaping material for an audience.

Jan and Kay’s songs are now moving from a community songwriting setting into the opening concert of a chamber music festival, alongside established Australian composers and new commissions. We are not presenting their work as a community-project add-on. We are saying: this music belongs here.

That philosophy also shapes the core Mirabilis ensemble. Younger musicians are not simply there to be mentored by older musicians; everyone brings knowledge. There are things I can teach after decades in the profession, and there are insights a sixteen-year-old musician can offer that immediately make me reconsider. The most interesting exchange happens when we stop assuming expertise travels in only one direction.

Q: In VIVID, creative leadership is given directly to queer and disabled artists. How does that reframe traditional chamber-music practice, and how is equity embedded in both the creative process and the performance environment?

A: With VIVID, we wanted equity to exist in the structure of the project, not simply in its subject matter.

Classical music has traditionally held quite fixed ideas about who has authority: the composer writes, the performer interprets, the artistic director programs, and the audience receives. VIVID gives us an opportunity to question those assumptions and make space for artists whose perspectives have not always been centred in classical music.

For me, that begins with listening: inviting artists into the creative process early, rather than programming something first and asking later how to make it more inclusive. It also means recognising that access is not an optional extra or a box to tick after the artistic decisions have been made.

We have considered the performance environment, communication, physical access and the way the event itself is framed. The program also includes conversation, so the artists can speak in their own voices rather than having their experiences interpreted by someone else.

Classical music can become stronger when we loosen some of its inherited conventions. The rigour and craft do not disappear. What changes is who gets to shape the room, whose experience is treated as valuable, and what we understand a chamber-music performance can be.

If equity is genuinely part of our practice, it must shape commissioning, programming, rehearsal processes, employment, access and decision-making. Ultimately, it changes who is heard, programmed, commissioned and paid. That is where inclusion becomes practice rather than intention.

Q: The festival features world premieres by Katherine Potter, Mia Brine, Rose Russell and Julia Nicholls. What briefs did you give them, and how do their works reflect or expand today’s Australian chamber-music landscape?

A: I deliberately did not give the four composers a single commissioning brief. I gave each a framework, then allowed her own musical voice to determine where the work went.

Katherine Potter’s new work grew from three poems by Fremantle poet Caitlin Maling, drawn from her collection Spore or Seed. I was immediately drawn to that collection as a mother myself, particularly because two members of the Mirabilis core ensemble are my own daughters. The poems explore motherhood in a way that feels very real to me: the anticipation, exhaustion, wonder and fear, the loss of self and the discovery of a new, expanded self.

Kathy’s setting responds closely to those emotional shifts. In the first movement, 38.6/39, she builds tension and expansion around the final weeks of pregnancy during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Love, the music moves between tenderness, exhaustion and an almost overwhelming scale of feeling. The final movement, I want to write a joyful poem, transforms that intensity into something more celebratory, gradually creating a sense of release and elation.

Mia Brine’s commission began with the history of the Queen’s Building on William Street and its connection with Wesley Church. Wesley has a rich musical tradition, and with Uniting Church in the City as such an important partner in Hear Her Now, it felt meaningful to commission a new work that engaged directly with the history, character and continuing life of these buildings.

Mia has taken that brief much further. Her three-movement work reflects the continual reinvention of the buildings themselves: sacred space, commercial space, cinema, workplace and heritage site. It is music rooted very specifically in place, history and the stories held within a part of Perth that many of us walk past every day.

What I love about Mia’s response is that she has not treated heritage as something static or reverential. She has made a work about change, adaptation and the complicated lives of buildings. It also feels like a meaningful way for the festival to acknowledge Wesley Church itself as a place with its own musical, social and architectural history.

Rose Russell is an exciting new voice, and I wanted to give her genuine creative freedom. I gave her carte blanche to choose the ensemble she wanted to write for from the instruments we had programmed for VIVID. She chose string quartet. I love that decision because the string quartet is arguably the most recognisable ensemble in the chamber music canon. Rose is adding her own voice to a form with centuries of history behind it. There is something very powerful about an emerging Western Australian composer saying, in effect, I belong in this tradition too.

Julia Nicholls brings yet another dimension. She has vast experience as a choral singer herself and finds enormous joy in writing for unaccompanied voices. I asked her to write a blessing for Wesley Church’s Tranby Chorale to sing at the conclusion of the service on the second Sunday of the festival, using biblical text from a female perspective wherever possible.

Julia chose the voices of three women from Scripture – Miriam, Hannah and Mary – weaving together brief excerpts rather than setting one continuous passage. Their words span generations, which feels particularly apt within Hear Her Now.

What excites me about all four commissions is that they are so different. One begins with contemporary poetry and motherhood; another with the history of a Perth building; another adds a young composer’s voice to one of chamber music’s defining ensembles; and another reaches into ancient texts to foreground women whose words have travelled across centuries.

That breadth reflects Australian chamber music as I see it now. There is no single sound or subject that defines it. These composers are drawing on place, identity, poetry, history, faith and their own musical experience.

Commissioning is also central to what the Hear Her Now festival is trying to achieve. It is important to rediscover and perform the extraordinary music by women that already exists, but we also have a responsibility to create the repertoire of the future.

All four of the composers commissioned for the festival are Western Australian. That matters too: Hear Her Now is not only looking outward across nine centuries of repertoire, but recognising the extraordinary creative work being made here in WA now.

Q: Through initiatives such as Open Stage, AMEB in Concert and Aussie Carnival of the Animals, Mirabilis places music by women directly in the hands of students and community musicians. How can that participation change the wider repertoire ecosystem in Western Australia?

A: This is one of the things I feel most strongly about. If we want repertoire to change, professional concert programming alone is not enough. Young musicians, teachers, community musicians, exam candidates and audiences need to encounter this music as a normal part of musical life.

Repertoire has an ecosystem. A student learns a piece. A teacher hears it and gives it to another student. A musician remembers it years later when programming a recital. An audience member hears a composer’s name for the first time and then recognises it somewhere else. That is how repertoire starts to become embedded.

Our Open Stage programis important because it gives the wider community a genuine place within the festival. Rather than audiences only coming to hear Mirabilis perform, community musicians, students and other ensembles can step onto the stage themselves and contribute repertoire by women to the program. We want those pathways built into the festival itself, rather than treating education and community participation as something that sits alongside the main artistic program.

That participation changes the relationship with the music. Once a musician has learned, rehearsed and performed a work, it becomes part of their own repertoire and musical memory. Open Stage helps move these composers out of the category of music people may have heard about and into music they have actually played, shared and owned.

Students and community musicians are part of the same festival, performing repertoire by women within the same broader musical conversation as our professional artists.

The same principle underpins AMEB in Concert. The Australian Music Examinations Board (AMEB) is one of the country’s major music education and examination bodies, and students will perform works by women that are already embedded in its syllabus. This music is not sitting outside music education waiting to be discovered; it is already there, ready to be taught, learned and performed.

More than thirty Methodist Ladies’ College students from Years 3 to 11 will take part. For me, that is where long-term change begins. If young musicians encounter women composers as a normal part of their training, those names and works become part of their musical vocabulary from the outset. They become music to return to, recommend, teach and eventually program themselves. That is how representation moves from being an aspiration to becoming habit.

Aussie Carnival of the Animals takes another route. All Mirabilis members are educators, so teaching and performing are closely connected in our work. My fellow Mirabilis director, Tresna Stampalia, and I were fortunate to study with the late Richard Gill. Some principles we absorbed from him – curiosity, participation, and making musical ideas accessible without simplifying them – have found their way into the show.

Aussie Carnival of the Animals introduces children and families to Australian women composers through something playful, immediate and accessible. For many young audience members, this may be their first encounter with these names and sounds.

That matters because audiences also develop repertoire habits. If children grow up hearing music by women as part of the ordinary concert experience, there is no need to frame it later as unusual or corrective. It is simply part of what music is.

Q: Much of the extraordinary music written by women remains absent from standard concert programs. Beyond a dedicated festival, how can Hear Her Now help move this repertoire from a thematic “special event” into a permanent part of Australian arts programming?

A: Ultimately, I would like a festival such as Hear Her Now to make its own premise less necessary.

A dedicated festival can draw attention to an imbalance very effectively. It can demonstrate the scale, quality and variety of the repertoire in a concentrated way. But the goal cannot be for music by women to live permanently in a separate category.

The real change happens when an artistic director or ensemble programs a sonata, a symphonic work or a chamber piece by a woman because it is the right work for that program, without feeling the need to explain or justify the work’s inclusion due to the composer’s gender.

There are practical steps organisations can take. They can broaden the repertoire considered at the start of programming rather than trying to improve representation after a season is largely decided. They can commission women consistently and examine who is represented in education programs, audition repertoire, music libraries and repertoire lists. Where practical gaps exist, they can invest in new editions, arrangements and commissions instead of allowing unavailable material to become a reason not to program the music.

We know this can be done because we have had to do it ourselves. Since Mirabilis began, we have commissioned 12 new works and created more than 80 arrangements. Sometimes changing the repertoire means actively creating the resources that allow that repertoire to be performed.

We also have to move beyond the idea that the problem is a shortage of repertoire. The music exists; much of it has existed for centuries. What is often missing is familiarity.

Institutions repeatedly perform certain works because musicians, conductors and audiences know them. That familiarity has enormous momentum, and repeated performance is how we change it. One concert will not establish a work in the repertoire; ten performances might begin to.

That is why Hear Her Now includes professional concerts, community musicians, students, new commissions, historical repertoire, Australian music and family events. We are trying to work at several points in the ecosystem at once.

For me, success would be hearing more and more of this music programmed across Australia with no special explanation attached.

It should not be remarkable to hear music by women. It should simply be part of what we mean when we say music.

Hear Her Now runs from 8–19 October 2026, with ticketed and free events across Perth.

Full program and tickets: mirabiliscollective.com/hear-her-now/program