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Photo: Roger Dilernia

Margaret Brandman's career in music as composer, pianist, recording artist, music educator, arranger, and writer on music education spans more than 50 years. Her award-winning compositions receive both live performances and airplay both in Australia and internationally. She has twice won the Artemis Women in Action Film Festival - Women Powered Music award for 'Best Foreign Composition'. This year (2021) she received the award for her Symphonic Tone Poem SPIRIT VISIONS. In 2019 she received the award for her Firestorm Symphony (III) 'All the Trees are Growing' from her Sensations album (nv6041). Both works were performed and recorded by the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra for albums produced by Parma Recordings USA.

Born in 1951 into a musical family, Brandman studied accordion and piano from the age of four, taking up guitar and clarinet in her teens. Her education, supported by formal studies in piano, clarinet, harmony and composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, covered many styles of music from Classical through to Jazz and Latin-American.

Brandman was awarded a scholarship to the University of Sydney, where she studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe. In 1975 she was awarded a Bachelor of Music (Composition), having already acquired her Associate Performer degree and Teacher of Pianoforte diploma. She has since also been awarded the F.Comp.ASMC, F.Mus.Ed.ASMC and L.Perf.ASMC degrees by the Australian Society for Musicology and Composition, Hon.FNMSM (UK), and the Dip.E in Piano Pedagogy of the World Piano Teacher's Association (Serbia).

To date, Parma Recordings (USA) have produced four albums of Brandman compositions: Sensations - Wind, Waves, Birds and Fire (nv6041) featuring one hour and nineteen minutes of her celebrated orchestral and chamber works, Polarities Vol.2 (nv 6353)a multi-composer album that includes her award-winning orchestral work Spirit Visions, Abrazo (AR0001), a multi-composer album recorded in Cuba, that includes her suite Warm Winds in Havana for saxophone quartet and percussion, and The Cosmic Wheel of the Zodiac (nv6160) a cycle of 12 songs, one for each sign of the Zodiac, composed to the lyrics of Astropoet Benita Rainer. This work was performed and recorded by the Prague Mixed Chamber Choir in 2017. Her Australian albums include her song cycle Songs of Love and Desire, written to the lyrics of mezzo-soprano Désirée Regina.

In 2020 she composed several new works including Aurora Australis for orchestra and the Look Around suite for saxophone quartet.

This year (2021) she has released three new works in her Cello Sensations series through the ModernClassicalx label: Lady of Grace, As Blue as Turquoise Pearls and Jucaro Rhumba D'Amor. These have been recorded by cellist Ariel Volovelsky together with Margaret on piano. She has also composed an eight- movement Latin-American suite for the Vov Dylan string ensemble. The first three movements were premiered in a concert in April 2021 and the entire suite was recorded in September.

Two significant syllabus additions for 2022 have been announced: 1) 'When Spirits Soar' for Soprano Saxophone with piano is included in the 2022 ABRSM (UK) 8th-grade Syllabus 2) Jucaro Rhumba D'Amor for Violin with Piano is included in the 2022 AMEB 7th grade violin syllabus.

It has been said of Brandman works '"The music is melodious and intricate, beautifully played.... pieces straddle that indefinable line between jazz and contemporary classical/new music."

Margaret Brandman — current to December 2021