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Linda Kouvaras, composer, musicologist, and pianist, is Professor at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne, with full representation at APRA-AMCOS. Her works have been performed around 200 times nationally and internationally in festivals and recitals. She has not studied composition formally but has benefited greatly from very generous feedback from Richard Ward, Brenton Broadstock, Stuart Greenbaum, Katy Abbott, and Maria Grenfell. She writes scored, virtuosic music for voice and acoustic instruments, with and without electronic effects.

Kouvaras was co-founder and keyboardist of the post-punk/New Wave band, Voxpop (1980-83) (see Who's Who of Australian Rock!, Melbourne: Five Mile Press, 2002). Kouvaras studied piano in the UK in 1984, returning to Melbourne University to complete her AMus in piano (1986), BMus (Hons) (1988), Master's in Piano (1991) and PhD in musicology (1996). Her piano teachers included John Irving, Ronald Farren-Price and Max Cooke, while research work was supervised by Malcolm Gillies, Brenton Broadstock, Naomi Cumming, and historian David Goodman.

Recordings of Kouvaras's performances, compositions and liner notes for other composers appear on several releases. Festival performances of her works include the fortyfivedownstairs Chamber Music Festival (2022-2025), Composing Women's Festivals (1994, 2004), the Melbourne Fringe Festival (2001), the Port Fairy Festival (2001 & 2002), and the Perth New Music Week (2001). Concert pianist and curator Coady Green is recording all of Kouvaras' chamber music to date (1991-2026) in an 8-CD release with Toccata Classics (London), 2022-2026. Deviani Segal and Linda Thompson commissioned Distant Lullaby for their CD of Australian lullabies, Repose, and she appears as both composer and pianist in Northcote Days for piano duet (2018) (on the CD Move 50). Her compositions are listed on the NSW HSC repertoire syllabi for piano, violin, saxophone and voice, 2015-2025, and on the AMEB's piano syllabi 2018-2025 for AMus Diploma. Kouvaras' works appear on university reading lists in Composition/Musicology streams. She has enjoyed four artist-in-residence stays (1999, 2000, 2001, 2010) at the Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Estate, Bundanon, NSW, and she was the Lyceum Club 2024 artist-in-residence.

Her monograph, Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-Digital Age (2013), won the IASPM-ANZ Rebecca Coyle publication prize in 2014. Kouvaras is co-editor (with Natalie Williams and Maria Grenfell) of A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds (2022) and The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process (2023).

Kouvaras writes: 'My composition practice explores various postmodern approaches, including incorporation of popular-music styles, minimalism and neo-tonal/modal structures. Extra-musical impetus ranges from humour to the tragic, kitsch to the high-order contemplative; topics that engage with topical issues; landscapes; specific locales -- all with the human condition as focal point.'

Linda Kouvaras — current to September 2025