VETERAN Canberra composer and creator, Judith Clingan, is midway through an exercise that characterises her lifelong work in the arts – she’s making music.

In a series of workshops devoted to the joy of music, Clingan has drawn musicians from around Australasia to gather at the Orana School. They started on Monday this week July 6 and will finish on Friday, July 17, with these holiday workshops to be followed by a two week tour of the East Coast of NSW.

Interstate tutors have been joined by Canberra’s Tobias Cole, Rowan Harvey-Martin, Johanna McBride and Sarah Rice to teach including choral singing, composition, song-writing, percussion, musicianship, theory, recorders and strings to Canberrans and also to an extraordinary 77 overseas students who have booked to be here for the tutorials, followed by the coastal tour.

There are four aspects to Clingan’s latest venture.

• In “Jubliate!  The Joy of Music-making,” she has been conducting tutorials and classes in singing, recorders and percussion.
• Her “Imagine  Music Theatre Workshops have focused on children and young people up to the age of 15
• In “Creative Collaborations,” she has directed her attention to  professional performers and performance teachers to explore performance possibilities, culminating in workshop performance .
• Finally in “World-Wide Wayfarers” she has attracted aspiring musicians from China, Taiwan and Japan in rehearsals throughout  July, leading to the east coast tour, which concludes in Sydney on Friday August 14.

Clingan is one of our best known arts personalities.

Born into an artistic family – her father was a jazz saxophonist in the 1930s and her mother Marianne was a well-regarded poet who has a street named after her in Wright, she moved to Canberra from Sydney in 1963 with her family to open the Monaro Bookshop in the new Monaro Mall.

A former Churchill Fellow, ACT Creative Arts Fellow and the first Canberra Artist of the Year, she initially studied at the ANU, becoming well known as the founder of such continuing institutions as Music for Everyone previously Gaudeamus), Canberra Recorder and Early Music Society, Canberra Children’s Choir, Young Music Society.

She also conducted choirs such as SCUNA, Canberra Choral Society, Chorus of Women, Lady’s Mantle,  Wayfarers Australia, and World-Wide Wayfarers, and has written much music, including significant works of music theatre. It is no surprise, then, to discover that as part of the present program, her newest work for music theatre, “Endangered,” will be performed.

On a melancholy note, Clingan asserts that this is her last big Canberra event and that she’ll be moving to Tasmania to live next year. But she also says she would love to be invited back to Canberra now and again to be involved in any interesting project.

We would not presume to liken her to Dames Nellie Melba and Edna Everage in the farewell department, but we cannot help thinking this is not the last we have seen of Judith Clingan.