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Photo: Roger Dilernia

Margaret Brandman's career in music as composer, pianist, 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. In 2019 she received the award for 'Best Foreign Composition' for her Firestorm Symphony (III) 'All the Trees are Growing' from the Artemis Women in Action Film Festival - Women Powered Music.

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 Assocation (Serbia).

To date, Parma Recordings (USA) have produced three albums of Brandman compositions with a fourth one due for release this year. Sensations - Wind, Waves, Birds and Fire (NV6041) featuring one hour and nineteen minutes of her celebrated orchestral and chamber works, Abrazo (AR0001), a compilation album recorded in Cuba, which 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 which 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 Brandman composed several new works including Aurora Australis for orchestra and her Look Around suite for saxophone quartet while in September 2020, the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra recorded her newly orchestrated symphonic tone-poem Spirit Visions for the compilation album Polarities 2 (Parma Recordings) which is due to be released in June this year. This work has received Official Selection for the 2021 Artemis Film Festival which will take place in Los Angeles on 22-25 April.

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 February 2021