Established Composer
$80,000

"The Fellowship will enable me to show the treasures of our poetry in a new light – via musical setting, and maybe preserve in a new form, some of our heritage that may have otherwise been forgotten…The Fellowship will free me from the need to undertake "bread and butter" conducting to earn a living so that I can have time, both creative and reflective, to develop and produce a folio of vocal music."

Dr Richard Mills was the recipient of the $80,000 Established Composer Fellowship for The 2005 Ian Potter Music Commissions Fellowships. Richard will start work on the Fellowship over 2007/2008.

Currently Richard Mills is the Artistic Director of the West Australian Opera, Artistic Consultant with Orchestra Victoria, and Director of the Australian Music Project for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. He also conducts throughout Australia and overseas.

Richard has conducted all the major orchestras in Australia and regularly performs in major Australian Festivals. He made his conducting debut in the USA with the Albany Symphony Orchestra in 1989 and his debut as an opera conductor with The Magic Flute at Opera Queensland. He now has a large repertoire of standard works, as well as a reputation for conducting contemporary opera and his own compositions.

His opera of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll premiered at Victorian State Opera in 1996, and received a Sydney season in 1999. His second opera, Batavia, (commissioned by Opera Australia), premiered at the Melbourne Festival in 2001 to great critical acclaim. Batavia consequently received a number of Green Room and Helpmann Awards, including Best Opera and Best New Australian Work. His new opera, The Love of the Nightingale will premiere at the 2007 Perth International Festival, and also be seen in Brisbane and Melbourne.

Richard describes his intended work:

"The collected wisdom of a nation is specifically present in its poetic heritage. The magic of woven words not only provides the specific inspired lyric moment, but also forms part of a larger diary of sensibility, a record of the human journey through our history captured with the incantatory precision of verse. Poets give us words for knowing and understanding the fullness of our humanity; in a sense poetry has the capacity to educate our feelings, to inform us via the unique perceptions of its authors of the possibilities of life, because a poet has the special talent to both tell stories and freeze moments of time in which experience and emotion are unified through inspired language."

"Poetry, and particularly Australian poetry, has been my companion since childhood. Judith Wright, David Campbell, James McAuley, Douglas Stewart, Shaw Neilson and many others spoke about the world I knew and led me to appreciate it and, in turn, many other aspects of life; comic, tragic, delightful and mysterious. In fact, one poem of Douglas Stewart’s The Jacaranda I remember from my school poetry book, a copy of which I found via an internet search. This poem, as well as the book, is out of print, like the works of many of our major poets."

"This Fellowship will give me the opportunity to write songs based, largely, on Australian poetry that will be able to be sung by of our current crop of fine singers and, I hope, add to the heritage of Australian song. Some will be for voice and piano and one of these for baritone, soprano and piano will be programmed by Musica Viva in 2008. I will also make recordings of the orchestral songs with the Tasmania Symphony in 2008 as part of their Australian Music Program. So the songs written during the Fellowship will receive air-play and become known."