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Photo: John Warren

Linda Kouvaras is a Melbourne composer, musicologist, and pianist. She has not studied composition formally but co-wrote many songs in the Punk/New Wave band, Voxpop, with co-instigator Richard Ward, during her seven-year Easter break from university studies in the early eighties. She has benefited greatly from very generous feedback over the years, particularly that from Ward, Brenton Broadstock, Stuart Greenbaum and Richard Zatorski. Linda has a proclivity toward text-setting, as well as writing for piano and for strings. Extra-musical catalysts incorporate a wide variety of subject matter; Inflight! (commissioned by the Australian Contemporary Chorale, 2004), for example, is a humorous work, underpinned by a sleazy blues-based line. The far graver Anagnorisis (53 days) mixes neo-modal and minimalist soundworlds.

Recordings of Kouvaras's performances and compositions appear on independent release, with Move Records, and with the ABC. At its release, her CD, Kouvaras: Piano Works, was 'CD of the week' on ABC Classic FM.

Kouvaras has enjoyed three artist-in-residence stays at the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Estate, Bundanon, NSW. Festival performances of her works include the National Composing Women's Festivals, The Melbourne Fringe Festival (2001), the Port Fairy Festival (2001 & 2002), and the Perth New Music Week (2001). Deviani Segal and Linda Thompson commissioned her to write Distant Lullaby for their CD of Australian lullabies, Repose while Ian Holtham has recorded Secrets of the Amphitheatre on Giants in the Land. Other recent commissions include an Arts Victoria grant to write for the Young Voices of Melbourne.

Kouvaras publishes in contemporary music, both classical and popular, focusing especially on Australian music, postmodernism and gender issues in music. With cultural theorist, David Bennett, she has been awarded an ARC Discovery Project Grant to research issues of postmodernism in contemporary Australian art-music (2005-07). Linda is a piano examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board; she is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Melbourne University and has been Senior Resident Tutor in Music and Creative Arts at Ormond College since 1993.

Kouvaras studied piano in the UK in 1984, returning to Melbourne University to complete her A.Mus in piano (1986), BMus (Hons) (1988), and Masters (1991). She also holds a PhD in musicology (1996). Her piano teachers included Ronald Farren-Price and Max Cooke, while research work was supervised by Brenton Broadstock, Naomi Cumming, and historian David Goodman. In the course of her studies Kouvaras received some 16 prizes/awards/scholarships as well as a Senior Research Fellowship at the Australia Centre.

Kouvaras writes: 'My composition practice explores various postmodern approaches, including incorporating popular-music styles, minimalism and neo-tonal/modal structures. Extra-musical impetus ranges from humour to the tragic, kitsch to the high-order contemplative - all with the human condition as focal point.'

Linda Kouvaras — current to September 2009