What does it mean to be part of a music industry that, for centuries, has ignored your perspective, undermined your talent and confidence, objectified your body, and systematically erased composers like you from the canon?
Led by Dr Felicity Wilcox, Emergence is a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Project (PRO22-14336), running from 2023-2026, funded by the Australian Research Council and University of Technology Sydney. The Emergence project investigates:
how the systems of musical practice that have traditionally marginalised women and gender-diverse music creators can be transformed;
how new approaches to artistic research can include diverse agents in the creation and performance of contemporary opera;
how data about gender in music can be translated into socially engaged art that contributes to cultural change;
and how emerging, global operatic practice is engaging with inclusive, interactive and interdisciplinary creative approaches.
As the key output for this project, Dr Wilcox will create a new work of music theatre with renowned librettist Alana Valentine and a stellar team of singers, instrumentalists, and other creatives. Forthcoming also, are scholarly articles on gender in music and contemporary opera; and a podcast that will examine state-of-the-art and gender in contemporary opera, featuring interviews with diverse, leading, global practitioners.
The creative work, EMERGENC/y is a heart-breaking, hilarious, no-holds-barred contemporary opera about Australian culture and society in the 21st century. Valentine’s libretto combines her edgy, poetic voice with verbatim text from the anonymised testimonials of over 200 music creators, sourced from the Women and Minority Genders in Music Report (Wilcox & Shannon 2023). Centering traditionally marginalised voices, the opera is currently in development with a diverse cast of singers to ensure a range of perspectives and practices are included in shaping it. The work engages experimentally with sound through guided improvisations on music and text, explorations of embodiment, radical extended techniques, and a consultative approach to conceptual development that respects difference and embraces feminist listening theory and acoustic ecology.
It is time to reinvent the stories that are told in opera and who gets to tell them; to re-imagine the ways they sound and to change the ways we listen. It is time for new voices to emerge.
Emergence Project Lead - Felicity Wilcox (she/her)
Dr Felicity Wilcox is a Senior Lecturer in Music and Sound Design at the University of Technology Sydney, and the current recipient of a prestigious Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council to conduct research on, and to make, contemporary opera. Her scholarly publications are in the areas of music for multimedia and gender in music; she edited the first book on the screen music of female composers, Women’s Music for the Screen-Diverse Narratives in Sound, published in 2022 with Routledge, New York. In 2023 she co-authored the Women and Minority Genders in Music report on gender representation in the music industries of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
As well as being a rising academic in her field, Felicity is a prolific composer, active across multiple domains since the late 1980s, whose compositions have been widely performed and broadcast in Australia and internationally. She was composer and Assistant Music Director for the 2000 Paralympic Games in Sydney, has received concert commissions for many leading artists and ensembles, and has composed the soundtracks for over 60 screen productions (as Felicity Fox), for which she has received awards and nominations for many major music industry awards in Australia. She composed original station themes for ABC Radio National which were on daily rotation from 1994-2005. Her recent solo albums have also received critical acclaim: her chamber opera Threading the Light (Move 2022) received 5-stars from Fine Music Sydney and her collection of chamber works, Uncovered Ground (Move 2021) received two 5-star reviews and was named ‘Pick of the week’ by music critics at the Sydney Morning Herald. Her quartet Sound Fields, composed for Rubiks Collective and for which she won the 2021 Pythia Prize, was shortlisted for Work of the Year (chamber) in the 2023 Australian Art Music Awards.
In Australia, Felicity’s works have been selected for international arts festivals including: Sydney Festival, Vivid Sydney, Canberra International Music Festival, and Sydney Mardi Gras Festival; and have been performed in iconic venues such as Sydney Opera House, Melbourne Recital Centre, and Belvoir St Theatre. Internationally her music has been programmed by arts organisations such as: Philadelphia Orchestra, New Music Network (USA), TurnUP Festival (USA), Sadari Theatre (Seoul), Claire Merviel Productions (Paris), Royal College of Music (London), Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester), Pantopia Festival (Berlin), and Balderin Sali (Helsinki), and has featured in international film festivals including Venice, Paris, Toronto, Berlin, Tokyo and many others. Her film music has been shortlisted for three AFI/AACTA Awards, and an ARIA Award, as well as winning APRA/AGSC Screen Music and a FIFREC Award (France) for Best Music for Film.
As a passionate advocate for gender diversity in music, Felicity was Chair and co-founder of the Gender Equity Committee of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers (2016-2020); served on the Gender Equity and Diversity Working Group of the International Council of Music Creators - CIAM (2019-20); was panellist and Chair for Women@CISAC for the International Society of Composers and Authors (2019), and was an Advisory Committee member of the Australian Women in Music Mentorship initiative (2019-21). She lives and works on Darug Country and pays her respects to Elders past, present, and emerging, and to all First Nations people, standing with them in solidarity on their sovereign lands.