This is how I remember her: laughing freely and delighting in the vibrant deep-orange landscape the colour of her hair. In 2008 I travelled together with Joséphine Markovits and a few friends of mine to Kooljaman, an Aboriginal-owned and -run wilderness camp at Cape Leveque, on the extraordinarily beautiful Dampier Peninsula in Bardi Jawi Country, the Kimberley, Western Australia. It was a dreamy expedition, setting off by 4-wheel drive heading 220km north from Broome to arrive at a place teeming with dolphins, humpback whales and the sounds of the Australian bush. I had just had the premiere of my opera The Navigator (2008) performed by the ELISION Ensemble at the Brisbane International Festival of the Arts which Joséphine had flown out from Paris to attend. She would later invite ELISION to perform the work at the 2009 Festival d’Automne à Paris in a concert version at L’Amphithéâtre at Opéra Bastille.
For Joséphine, the outback trip was one of deep nostalgia. She had an abiding interest in and love for Australia and especially its Aboriginal cultures. From 1972-2023 she was a curator and later the Artistic Director of Music at the Festival d’Automne à Paris. In the early 1980s she had travelled across Australia visiting Indigenous communities in various parts of Arnhem Land and the Central desert at a time when few people in Australia, much less Europe, had visited these places. Her long and distinguished history at the festival is covered in an obituary in Le Monde. In this and other news articles, she is celebrated for championing ‘today’s music’, seeking out in particular, experimental, emerging and challenging work. To give an early Australian example, composer Warren Burt recounts that in 1983, ‘at the invitation of Festival Organiser Joséphine Markovits, a crew consisting of Chris Mann, Ron Nagorcka, David Chesworth, Ros Bandt, Sarah Hopkins, Leigh Hobba (an Adelaide-based composer now living in Hobart, known for the elegance of his environmentally based works), Jon Rose, Martin Wesley-Smith and myself travelled to Paris and performed at the Centre Pompidou’. https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/article/some-musical-and-sociological-aspects-of-australian-experimental-music
This is how I remember her: fiercely loyal, very (very) demanding, and determined to overcome any obstacle in realising ambitious projects at the highest possible quality. There are so many examples of composers she fiercely defended before they were famous: Philip Glass, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, Olga Neuwirth, Clara Iannotta and many, many others. She had an incredible 6th sense for bringing into view concepts and works from composers that they themselves didn’t know they could achieve: see George Benjamin’s comments about Joséphine commissioning his first opera Into the Little Hill (2006); and Clara Iannotta’s comments about Joséphine’s support for her work even when she was still a student.
I first met Joséphine Markovits in 2000 when my work Machine for Contacting the Dead (2000) was premiered by the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris. She then went on to commission several works from me and also presented my opera, orchestral and chamber works in editions of the festival in 2005, 2008, 2009, 2021 & 2023. I’m indebted to her as a composer for these incredible opportunities to make work and for her unflagging belief in my work. In 2004, when I had had a fallow period of 2 years following the birth of my son, it was Joséphine who came to me with not one but three commissions that opened up a whole new period of creative vitality.
Festival commissions (The Quickening and The Tailor of Time are dedicated to Joséphine)
In the Shadow’s Light (2004), string quartet
Commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris (Fd’A)
Premiere: 29 November 2005, Paris, Cité de la Musique, Kairos Quartett
The Quickening (2004-05), soprano & guqin, text by Yang Lian
Commissioned by the Fd’A
Premiere: 29 November 2005, Paris, Cité de la Musique, Deborah Kayser & Yang Chunwei
Mother Tongue (2005), soprano & 15 instruments, text by Patricia Sykes
Co-commissioned by the Fd’A, Ensemble Intercontemporain and ELISION Ensemble
Premiere: 30 November 2005, Paris, Cité de la Musique
Ensemble Intercontemporain, soprano Piia Komsi, conductor Jonathan Nott
The Tailor of Time (2023), solo oboe/ oboe d’amore/ bass oboe; solo harp and 28 musicians
Co-commissioned by Ensemble Intercontemporain, Strasbourg Musica, and Festival d’Automne à Paris.
Paris Premiere: 4 November 2023, Festival d’Automne, Ensemble Intercontemporain with oboist Philippe Grauvogel and harpist Valeria Kafelnikov, conducted by Enno Poppe
This is how I remember her: in music
Recording: ELISION conducted by Jean Deroyer, soprano Piia Komsi
ELISION 20th Birthday concert, Verbrugghen Hall, Sydney, 2006
libretto by Patricia Sykes
text of this excerpt:
their colander bones, a sifting so alive
the clouds pour and pour through them: ‘look!
the footprints in the mouth have left us their wings!’
their smallest noise pinpoints a galaxy
Liza Lim 