Quotes of the Day

For a composer whose work is rarely soothing and more often than not unsettling, it's fascinating to watch Liza Lim attempt to calm her crying three-year-old son Raphael. "Do you want me to wheel you out?" she asks him at the headquarters of the Sydney Symphony, where Lim is composer in residence. She moves his stroller around the conference table, but still he whimpers. "Would you like some water?" Instead, Raphael calls out for his father, Daryl Buckley, who is artistic director of the new-music elision Ensemble, based at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. "You want a Spiderman lolly?" Lim flourishes the dispenser from a knapsack, and the clicking sound of the sweet's release does the trick. Raphael is quiet.

As a composer, Lim won't apply a sweetener to her music. In the world of modern orchestral arrangements, this hovers somewhere between the strange and the familiar - both lush and harsh, with the ancient sounds of the Japanese harp giving way, in one piece, to the ringing of tuned glass bottles. In the shifting tones, a faint harmony seems just out of reach. Lim likens the effect to "birdsong beginning inside the egg," a phrase she quotes from the 13th century Sufi mystic Jelaluddin Rumi. Even classical audiences can find Lim's music obscure. "The point for Liza is not about winning a popularity contest," says her husband and collaborator Buckley, who studied with Lim at Melbourne's Victorian College of the Arts. "It's not a conversation saying to the audience, 'If I write you another melody, will you love me a little bit more, please?'"

But love is surely what the world of contemporary music feels for Liza (pronounced Lee-za), 38. Barely out of the VCA, Lim was approached by Germany's Radio Bremen to create a new work for soprano and orchestra, and the febrile Voodoo Child (1989) was born. A flood of commissions followed, climaxing last year with her most ambitious work, Ecstatic Architecture, for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's inaugural season at the new Walt Disney Concert Hall. Inspired by Frank Gehry's gravity-defying architecture, the piece saw Lim's musical standing soar. In November, the Festival D'Automne in Paris will premiere three new pieces, continuing a French love affair with her work. "It's a bit of an empire thing for them," Lim explains, "where they're interested in what's happening in Mongolia, in Iran …" Which suits her just fine. "I'm always looking out for points of inspiration," she says.

In the meantime, Australia has reclaimed its "voodoo child." At the beginning of her three-year residency with the Sydney Symphony, the composer this week premieres her latest work for the orchestra. Immer Fliessender (Ever Flowing) is written as an eight-minute prelude to Mahler's Ninth. In architectural terms, that's a little like adding a pyramid to the Louvre. For the piece, Lim extrapolates an Arabic inflection she detects in Mahler's expansive final symphony - "it's like the colors of that fabulous world," she says, "but a different twist - looking at it sideways." For her next SSO work in 2006, Lim hopes to reconfigure the orchestra's sound with a didgeridoo. "That has been one of my projects as a composer," she says, "to have that cross-fertilization between different cultures of music."

Born of Chinese parents in Perth before growing up in Brunei and, later, Melbourne, Lim is cross-fertilization in action. Her music embodies the process. The Alchemical Wedding, which elision premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 1996, shifts almost imperceptibly between Western and Eastern sounds, from contrabassoon to erhu (as bridegroom and bride), in a sliding scale of culture. With Inguz (1996), named after a Viking rune symbolizing fertility, the clarinet threatens to soar at any moment into Gershwin-like rhapsody, but gives birth to something else - music as anthropology. For her 2000 opera Moon Spirit Feasting, the composer spent time in Malaysia observing the Hungry Ghost Festival, when Chinese communities entertain ancestral spirits with a month of street theater and song. In this sense, Lim's music is a votive offering to her past.

This can give rise to the stridency of Voodoo Child, which recalls the madwoman wailings of Yoko Ono (Lim's teenage heroine), but at its best her music communes powerfully with another realm. Commissioned by France's Ensemble Intercontemporain in 2001, Machine for Contacting the Dead was performed as part of a Paris museum show centering on the 2,500-year-old tomb of the Chinese Marquis Yi of Zeng. Among the objects excavated at his tomb in central Hubei province were 65 bronze bells as well as a courtly orchestra of drums, mouth organs and flutes. But Lim was moved most of all by the story of the 21 concubines buried alive with the marquis, their harps muted. Her poignant piece, pregnant with silence, evokes their wheezing, dying breaths.

If Lim's composition can seem an aural puzzle, that is its point. The composer loves the way music can offer up its secrets slowly over time, performance by performance. "No one can know everything about it," she says. "That's why we play Beethoven." Come July, Lim will give up more of her secrets at a workshop for the Contemporary Music Festival in Sydney. Part of her mission will be to teach audiences how to listen. "That's one of the issues of new music," she says. "What are you listening for? It could be about the way the clarinet gives a sound to the cello. Or maybe rhythm is more important. Or texture." Lim's sonic world has that in abundance. For Austria's Salzburg Festival in August, Lim hopes to put to song the Aboriginal concept of kalyuyuru, "which is like water shimmering as it falls," she explains. Completing the metaphor, husband Daryl Buckley likens Lim's musical career to "a bright flowing river." Runs deep.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Drawing inspiration from viking runes, Chinese tombs and didgeridoos, Liza Lim composes music to pin your ears back