Cat Hope

Catherine Anne "Cat" Hope (born 11 March 1966), is an Australian composer, musician and academic. She started her music and academic careers in Perth and relocated to Melbourne in 2017. Her opera, Speechless, was first performed in 2019 at the Perth Festival. At the Art Music Awards of 2020 she won Work of the Year: Dramatic for Speechless. Steve Dow of The Age described the opera, "fuelled by outrage over the imprisonment of asylum seeker children, which features growling and screaming to an unconventional score without musical notation." Her father was an RAAF officer and her mother was a nurse; from 9 to 12 years-old she had guitar lessons while her father was based in Penang, Malaysia; upon her reaching secondary school age the family relocated to Perth. She continued with guitar in secondary school and added flute and bass guitar in her final years at Rossmoyne Senior High School. While a university student she also had to teach herself to play piano to keep up with her studies. She was a member of the ALEA Ensemble (named for their aleatoric composition style), in 1989.

In 1988 in Italy, Hope founded the folk-rock indie trio, Micevice, with Hope on bass guitar, Marta Collica on lead vocals and Giovanni Ferrario on guitar. It was re-release nearly ten years later (November 2008) via My Honey Records. Luigi Gaudio of OndaRock rated it at 7.5 and explained, "The eleven tracks are rare pearls, a cloud of warm smoke that envelops anyone who abandons themselves." Their debut album, Cage of Stars, appeared later that year. Later members included Kristian Brenchley on guitar, Tim Evans on drums (both c. 2000), Bill Darby on guitar, Pete Guazzelli on drums (both c. 2006). and founder and bassist in Abe Sada (2004–2014). She is the founder of the Low Tone Orchestra (2020-), The Australian Bass Orchestra (2014-) and is a performer in noise duos Super Luminum (with guitarist Lisa MacKinney, 2015-), HzHzHz (with cellist Tristen Parr, 2016-) and Candied Limbs (with clarinettist Vickery, 2012-). As a flute player, she has worked with French composers Eliane Radigue and . Her solo bass noise piece for dance artist Rakini Devi appeared on the various artists' compilation album, Extreme Music from Women, issued by the Susan Lawly label in 2000. Since then she has released a wide range of music compositions and performances on music labels around the world, most recently on the Swiss label Hat Hut.

Rosalind Appleby, a music journalist, in her book, Women of Note: the Rise of Australian Women Composers (2012), addressed the work of Hope in the chapter, "Third wave 1980-2010: Cathie Travers and Cat Hope". In honour of Roger Smalley, who died in August 2015, Hope directed Decibel, to reinvigorate his works, which had been "performed in the pioneering electro-acoustic ensemble Intermodulation", for a concert in June 2016. The West Australians Appleby observed, "[they] brought the little-known repertoire back to life. Their concert... paid fascinating homage to Smalley." It was followed by the premiere of her work, Silenced, co-composed with Dobromila Jaskot. Hope wrote it as a response to The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention presented by the 2014 Human Rights Commission. At the Art Music Awards of 2020 Hope, and the performers, won Work of the Year: Dramatic for Speechless.

Academic career

Hope is a music academic, with research areas in animated notation, gender and music, digital archives, Australian music and artistic research in composition and performance. She lectured in classical music and music technology at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University between 2004 and 2010, and was the Inaugural Associate Dean (Research) there in 2016 after Postdoctoral Fellowship. Hope holds a PhD in art from RMIT University, her thesis, "The Possibility of Infrasonic Music", was delivered in 2010. She was the Professor of Music at Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music at Monash University, where she was head of school from 2017 to 2020.

APRA Music Awards

APRA AMCOS (Australasian Performing Right Association, Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) and Australian Music Centre (AMC) have co-sponsored the annual APRA Music Awards: Art Music Awards (originally Classical Music Awards) since 2002. Previously AMC had provided their own annual classical music awards from 1988. Hope has been awarded three Art Music Awards, the Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011 and in 2014 and Work of the Year: Dramatic for her first opera, Speechless in 2020.