Flinders Quartet is one of Australia’s most loved chamber music ensembles; a quartet for the twenty-first century. We’re deeply committed to growing the Australian tradition of chamber music and sharing it with our national and international audiences, so we regularly commission and premiere works by Australian composers. We know the development and presentation of new works is an essential part to being Victoria's string quartet.

Emerging composer, John Rotar, with Shane Chen at FQ's 2016 composer workshop

Australian chamber music has an exciting future, but composers need a hand getting off the starting block. We want to invest in the best new emerging composers, and develop their unique compositional voice and skills. We want to give them the opportunity to not just explore their composition with a live, professional string quartet, but we are also looking for new talent to include in our subsequent subscription concert seasons. These future opportunities will provide an important stepping-stone to establishing a career in the industry.

FQ with composer and 2016 mentor, Stuart Greenbaum

FQ’s composer workshop initative aims to kick start the careers of the next generation of Peter Sculthorpes and Elena Kats-Chernins. Each composition will be professionally performed in concert, recorded, and streamed live for maximum exposure. Mary Finsterer will be working with us in 2017 as a mentor to bring the best out of these wonderful composers and their pieces.

We have selected six amazing compositions following a national selection process and we are keen to get working, but we need your help. We have some other support, but we still need to raise $2,500 to make these workshops happen. Join us in assisting these incredibly talented artists to share their visions with audiences.

Compositions can't come to life until they are played. Then they become real. 

Be part of the future of chamber music in Australia.

Find out more about Flinders Quartet

FQ need $22,500 to make sure these workshops get off and running. We're pitching in some of our own money but we need at least $2,500 from the pozible campaign to cover the Composer Workshop Concert.

Pozible Campaign funds will be used for:

1. $500 to employ a recording engineer to record the concert - We want you to be able to enjoy this music for years to come.   You can say you knew these composers before they were famous! Recordings also help composers convince the industry that their music is worth playing.
2. $500 to provide the composers with a composition mentor - Having a mentor is vital to the development of the emerging composers.  We are lucky to have the incredible expertise of Stuart Greenbaum working with us.
3. $500 to live-stream the concert - We realise that not everyone lives in Melbourne and can join us for this unique event. Streaming the concert will open up audiences across Australia and allow international audiences to share in this new work.
4. $1000 Musicians rehearsals - Every creative process needs time and a place to grow...

There are some fun pledge rewards on offer, or you can choose to make a 'no reward' donation (all donations over $2 recieve a tax deductable receipt). The more you give, the more we can offer the next generation of exceptional musical artists and their work.  

Our greatest risk is our ability to raise enough funds to make this program happen. There is a huge amount of talent worth supporting in Australia, and we just don’t have enough time or resources to support as many as we would like. The more we raise the brighter the future of Australian chamber music is.

Our second challenge is the complexity of the compositions. Some of the pieces we have chosen for this program are pretty complicated, but we’ve allocated lots of rehearsal time to make sure we that we are able to really embrace the difficulties and delights of each piece.

We’re going to be approaching this issue the same way the Beethoven Quartet did with Shostakovich when he was worried that his compositions were not going to be playable. They said to him, “you should write whatever you want, our business is to play it.” Only this way will we stumble on unexpected discoveries and innovations.