CANBERRA experimental musician, Sia Ahmad, was one of the front runners at the 12th annual Art Music Awards held in North Melbourne last week  (August 31).

Presented annually by APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre, the Art Music Awards acknowledge the achievements of composers, performers, educators and leaders in the genres of contemporary classical music, jazz, improvisation, sound art and experimental music.

The Work of the Year: Electroacoustic/Sound Art prize was awarded to Ahmad’s “Depth Disintegration,” described as “a mesmerising and unique work,” was written specifically for Benjamin Anderson and the world’s only double-belled bass trombone”.

A well-known member of the Canberra arts community, Ahmad was a founding member of the ACT Arts Minister’s Creative Council, a songwriter, improviser curator and facilitator bringing a DIY punk aesthetic to her eclectic performance works.

She now works as creative producer of Ainslie and Gorman Arts centres, where she is looking at art music and how to program it for bigger, newer audiences.

I caught up with Ahmad after she’d returned from the event in Melbourne.

“It was great, it was a total surprise for me, I’ve never been a nominated for an award like this before,” she said, “it had been an honour to be nominated as a finalist in first in the first place.”

Ahmad believes she is the first person of south Asian (in her case Bangladeshi) descent to win a lead award in the Art Music Awards and the first person to win who identifies as transgender, too.

Describing the event as “a great night for the art music community on the continent to come together after the last crazy few years” she reports that it was “nice to meet people in person  that I had connected with on Zoom.

In fact, she said, Zoom had played an important part in the genesis of her prizewinning work, intended as a live performance but mostly workshopped on Zoom – “a very strange process for a commissioned work,” she said.

Even the premiere had to be delayed until late 2021, so was “a real product of its time”.

The commission to compose for Benjamin Anderson was the result of a composition prize run through Homophonic! which celebrates queer composers as part of the Midsumma Festival in Melbourne.

Ahmed described the double-belled bass trombone as an instrument that allowed her as composer to move between the two octaves made possible.

“It was really something, but I never saw it in person until the premiere,” she said.

The night of nights, hosted live by Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe, Emma Donovan and Aaron Wyatt following two years of online announcements, also featured other Canberra musicians, with Canberra Symphony Orchestra acknowledged in state and territory-based categories for its “Australian Series” and Canberra-born-and-raised jazz singer Gian Slater winning Work of the Year: Jazz for her “Grey is Ground” album, her sixth solo release.

The full list of winners at the 2022 Art Music Awards may be found here

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