The carnyx is an ancient bronze trumpet, once used by Iron Age warriors who relied on its otherworldly blood-curdling cry to fill their opponents with the literal fear of God. The composer Liza Lim conceived her forthcoming work Tongue of the Land, crafted for the Dutch trumpeter Marco Blaauw, around the demands of this long-forgotten instrumental hardware. (The last time it achieved contemporary prominence was in the opening battle sequence of Ridley Scott’s 2000 film Gladiator.) In a program note she explains that she wrote the twenty-minute composition with a particular, well-known carnyx in mind, a “spectacular Celtic boar-headed” specimen that “lay buried for over two thousand years,” having been ritually broken around 50 BCE, before researchers discovered it in 2004 and a French master coppersmith took on the task of reconstructing it.

Her aim, she writes, was to “re-awaken” the instrument—“a kind of ‘de-extinction’ project.” She and Blaauw, she writes, “delved into findings from the excavation led by archaeologist Christophe Maniquet in which seven carnyces were discovered at a Gallo-Roman fanum (temple complex) in 2004 at Tintignac, near Naves, Corrèze, in the South of France.” Until then, she continues, “our understanding of the carnyx” had “only been known through writings and iconography, and as material fragments.” Now “its disruptive glamour, sense of excess, ferocity and mystery” are with us again.

“De-extinction” has been a constant refrain in Lim’s music, even when she isn’t resurrecting instruments considered obsolete. Contemporary opera often relies on retreading the plots of already existent films or books, reducing the music to atmospheric scene-setting, like a film score played live. Lim has invigorated the form by returning music and sound to the center of the drama, where they do more than merely carry words. A month before Tongue of the Land is unleashed in August, her stage piece The Oresteia (1993) will have a week-long run at Carriageworks in Sydney, performed for the first time since its premiere, by six singers and the ensemble ELISION, who gave that first performance and with whom Lim has been associated since.

Lim’s score feels built around the assumption that foundational ancient Greek myths about justice and revenge—such as the tale of Clytemnestra taking a lover, killing her husband Agamemnon, and triggering a chain of murder and vengeance—are already imprinted on the collective consciousness. There is nothing to be gained by simply retelling them. Instead Lim and her collaborator Barrie Kosky assembled a text of their own using three sources: Aeschylus’s original drama The Oresteia, Tony Harrison’s 1981 modern translation, and thematically connected poems by Sappho.

Recalling dark, ancient voices can load performance spaces with the expectation of past forms. Lim’s five stage works, from The Oresteia to her most recent, Atlas of The Sky (2018), are listed on her website under “opera” only because, you feel, there is no more fitting category. Lim calls her Oresteia a work of “memory theatre” in recognition, she’s said, “that the themes of an ancient Greek drama…still resonate as strongly as ever in the present,” that “the ghosts peopling Aeschylus’ drama are not yet at rest.” Their energies, she continues, “call out to us to have a hearing in new contexts.”

Her Oresteia doesn’t so much retell a linear narrative as splice and dice Aeschylus’s text into bits of history and language—sometimes even single words—that puncture, or are scattered among, fragments from Sappho and from Harrison’s translation, pulling the audience into momentary glimpses of characters either caught in turmoil or reflecting upon their emotions. Significant events are viewed from multiple vantage points, split seconds of what had come before are magnified—then Lim plunges ever deeper inside textual and textural detail. Rather than allowing words simply to convey meaning, she worries at them, stretching and fracturing individual syllables until they become sonic objects in themselves. At the very opening of the piece, Cassandra’s cries of “otototoi” and “Popoi da!”—expressions of pained grief, translating roughly as “woe is me” and “this terrible thing”—are elongated, splintered, and revoiced, the sounds catching in the throat as if being forced through too narrow an opening. The effect is to suspend dramatic time and draw the listener into the interior grain of utterance, where language hovers on the edge of becoming pure sound.

Lim is not alone in rendering antiquity in this postmodern mode. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Licht (begun 1977) feasted on a heady brew of Christian theology, archetypal myth, and self-invention, while Harrison Birtwistle’s landmark The Mask of Orpheus (1986) layered up multiple tellings of the Orpheus myth. But her raw-boned frenzy is a world unto itself. The human voice, in her imagining, exists in perpetual transformation, with notes no longer a fixed point within a scale but rather wrenched out of shape, fracturing at the brink of inaudibility: her whimpers, screams, and sustained streams of breath push far beyond the conventions of vocal writing. Her instrumental writing, likewise, uses microtones to pixelate clean melodic contours and snaps notes by instructing string players to push against the strings more firmly than they would ordinarily, or wind and brass to blast more air through their instruments than usually required. In a work conveying the frailty of the human spirit, both characters and sounds waver between certainty and disintegration.

Lim was twenty-six when, in May 1993, performances of The Oresteia in Melbourne culminated in a suitably take-no-prisoners recording, rereleased in 2021 by Huddersfield Contemporary Records, that helped establish her reputation. Yet her earlier works had already unpicked the obsessions that now feel central to her vision. Voodoo Child (1989), for soprano and small ensemble, resisted “setting” Sappho’s poetry word to note. Instead it penetrated directly into the sound of individual words and stanzas, clawing open vowels and subjecting notes to microtonal smudges—sounds which, as in The Oresteia to come, became inseparable from the textures and coloristic tinctures of Lim’s instrumentation. The Heart’s Ear (1997), written for a mixed ensemble of woodwinds and strings, spiraled outward from a fragment of a Sufi melody. Rather than developing that fragment or treating it as a theme from which to spin variations, Lim used it as a mould that actively shaped every melodic and harmonic turn and incline, momentum that built toward a solo violin line rocking itself to sleep.

Lim’s early works—jam-packed and finely wrought—suggest an allegiance with so-called New Complexity, a label that became attached to a school of composers who emerged during the early 1970s. Taking inspiration from Schoenberg, Ives, Webern, Boulez, and Elliott Carter, but also from medieval music, nineteenth-century pianistic virtuosity, and free jazz, these composers conceived of coiled-up, labyrinthine scores that coursed with notes and intricately notated layers of independently minded rhythms. One leading British composer associated with the school, Michael Finnissy, had lived and worked in Australia during the mid-1980s; Lim was also drawn to another British composer associated with this cohort, Brian Ferneyhough, whose chamber and instrumental works pursued the idea of rhythmic complexity to its logical, head-spinning endpoint: multiple, simultaneously heard temporal layers that collide, overlap, and resist straightforward rhythmic synchronization.

About the only point on which New Complexity composers could agree was their rejection of the term “New Complexity,” which they dismissed as both restrictive and prescriptive. Lim quickly asserted a similar steely independence, and has spoken widely about her sense of falling between the usual cultural cracks and existing in “a quite in-between space.” She was born in Perth; three years later her parents, who were Chinese, relocated the family to Brunei, off the northern coast of Borneo. The family subsequently moved back to Australia, and when Lim was eleven they sent her to the Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne, which was formative to her thinking. A simpatico music teacher turned her ears to Cage, Stockhausen, Penderecki, Berio, Penderecki, Ligeti, and the early, experimental work of Yoko Ono. Lim was encouraged to experiment with sound-making on her chosen instrument, the violin, which she did with gusto, exploring alternate tunings and “preparing” her instrument by wedging objects between the strings. Through her radio she discovered a whole world of modern composition from Australia, America, and Europe.

Her background gave Lim a distinctive cultural filter through which to view Western tradition. Growing up, she had spoken both Chinese languages used by her parents, Hainanese and Hokkien, and in Brunei she switched with ease between Malay, Chinese, and English. During her childhood, Lim recalled in a 2022 profile, English was one spoken “dialect” of many: “If you say the dialect is your language, that a mixed-up, creolized culture is your culture rather something lesser-than, it takes you into another space.”

Lim channelled this perspective into a sustained engagement with Aboriginal culture, immersing herself in the social world of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory. Understanding their musical traditions was fundamental to her study, although the purpose of her painstaking research was never to catalogue an inventory of “useful” material with which to add spice to her scores, but rather to ask how rigorous engagement with another culture could change how she thought about musical process itself.

The first piece to emerge from her study was a brief oboe etude called Shimmer (2005), out of which Shimmer Songs (for harp, string quartet, and three percussionists), Songs Found in Dream (for ensemble), and Invisibility (for solo cello) all evolved. “Shimmer” alludes to a signature technique of Yolngu art in which highly refined and intricate cross-hatching lifts plain surfaces to an illusion of three dimensions. A subsequent work, Sex Magic (2019–2020), grounded itself in the three-dimensional physicality of the human body, specifically in what Lim described as “the sacred erotic in women’s history.” Tailored for the skills of Claire Chase, who plays contrabass flute (as well as ocarina and an Aztec death whistle), the piece uses the womb as a metaphor for bringing sounds to life. Its pulsating, breath-fuelled sonorities carry textures and timbres through a continual process of transformation—sounds conceived, reborn, and renewed.

Oboes, flutes, and cellos, in Lim’s hands, lose any of their classical associations of Mozartian elegance or burnished Romantic nostalgia. They operate like mutant instruments, many heads wrestling with their internal voices in constant, restless motion. Invisibility ups the ante by having one cellist use two bows, one of which is modified by wrapping the bow hair around the wood to produce a flinty, percussive attack. Lim also instructs the cellist to retune their instrument away from its customary consonant symmetry; suddenly it turns into an alien landscape through which the performer must constantly find ways to reorient themselves.

De-tuning, in practice, means making strings tauter or looser than usual against the cello fingerboard, which reveals micro-details of pitch and texture lost to the constraints of conventional technique. It also introduces a degree of instability. The instrument will squeak and pop beyond the cellist’s control, sounds that become intrinsic to the work’s sonic palette. Sex Magic’s contrabass flute, pitched a whole two octaves lower than the conventional instrument, “gave birth” to the clatter of small pieces of percussion, laid out on tables, wired up to vibrate with supple nuance in sympathy with both its sensual long breaths and its crisp, clipped key clicks.

Sex Magic was definitively the work of a female composer who is also a mother, and Lim has negotiated the responsibility that comes with being a “woman composer” with care. In her role as the Peter Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, she has spoken up in favor of giving women artists priority in funding and programming and, from 2018 to 2021, led the institution’s Composing Women program, designed to encourage female composers. Among her mentees are Bree van Reyk, Peggy Polias, and Georgia Scott, all of whom, in their distinct styles, probe fluidly evolving textures and nuanced instrumental color in ways that learn from Lim’s work.

Leading the way to Tongue of the Land are a handful of recent compositions that seem to construct musical syntax out of first principle. String Creatures (2022), commissioned for the New York–based JACK Quartet and released by the British NMC label last year on a disc with two solo string pieces, is not only about what the string quartet has represented historically—and how composers might convincingly propel that tradition forward—but also about the very materiality and function of string itself. Writing it led Lim to rethink the relationship string players have with their instruments and how bows can touch strings beyond the confines of traditional techniques. String is a material, Lim tells us in her booklet note, that “offers a generative language for thinking about relations in the world: binding and unbinding, entanglement, knots, frictions, tensions.”

Two other recent works—Extinction Events & Dawn Chorus (2017–2018) and Annunciation Triptych (2019–2022)—take up the tension between violent ecological loss and the fragile persistence of life. In the earlier piece, for mixed chamber ensemble, the score’s fractured textures and unstable rhythms present a musical ecosystem that is under unsustainable stress: strings creak, brass players sob through their mouthpieces, and percussion instruments rattle with menace. Lim’s despair over what she calls the “plastic trash” contaminating oceans pollutes the music itself as the musicians pass a long sheet of plastic above their heads, its synthetic rustling out of place among such carefully chosen sounds.

The dawn chorus eventually pipes up as toy instruments evoke croaking frogs. Overlapping and interdependent lines inspired by birdsong tweet softer-than-soft sounds, fleeting and precarious, that demand heightened attention. A performance I attended at Kings Place in London in February 2020, by the excellent Riot Ensemble, played itself out against the encroaching pandemic doom. During the long months of lockdown and the worry that followed, Lim’s piece kept rewinding through my imagination as a vision of how society, like the music, might patch itself back together after a prolonged and enforced silence. 

In notable contrast to the creaks and stresses of Extinction Events, Annunciation Triptych captures sound forever blossoming. A gargantuan, forty-five minute score conceived for large orchestra, joined during its final section by a soprano voice, it sings the praises of three female spiritual lodestars: Sappho and Mary and, in its final movement, Lady Fatimah al-Zahra, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, who Lim views as “the ‘seed of light’ that radiates into the world.” Lim juxtaposes the view of transcendence these figures represent for her with a range of gestures inherited from the nineteenth-century orchestral music of Mahler, Bruckner, and Wagner—composers preoccupied with myth, spiritual questing, and grand-design musical architecture. Compared to Extinction Events, this was a radically different perspective on how a twenty-first-century composer might write a song of the earth.

The piece opens with a shimmer-shiver of luminous woodwind and a French horn line taking a tumble down the raw, natural overtones of the harmonic series, before a sudden silence, which is broken eventually by the resonant thud of a low harp string. The blazing, radiant major harmonies that crash through the middle of the second section, “Mary/Transcendence after Trauma,” shocking in their tonal nakedness, also arrive sounding refreshed and revitalized. Lim’s chords explicitly relate to the prelude of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, but she follows up on that opening horn gesture by continually dragging orchestral brass back inside the raw physics of harmonic series, making us work hard to appreciate the simple satisfaction of tonal resolution again.

Annunciation Triptych, which exists in a fabulous recording on the Kairos label by the soprano Emily Hindrichs and the WDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Cristian Măcelaru, is perhaps the best place to start a journey through Lim’s music. Its orchestral weight and the music’s structural pacing retread landscapes already traversed in the nineteenth century, yet Lim breathes the air differently. Those grand moments of tonal arrival, far from the certainty of Mahler or Bruckner, shake the orchestra to its core, requiring its sounds to gradually rediscover their center. The same impulse recurs across Lim’s works, which never simply revive lost traditions or inherited forms but interrogate the reasons those forms exist at all, testing, dismantling and reimagining the conditions under which music can remain alive.