Rare Air With Meri Fatin

Composer Cat Hope has been described as “a superstar of Australian new music” best known for her graphic scores and new score-reading technologies.   It’s fascinating to wonder how the daughter of a military family with no especial leaning towards the arts has ended up being an internationally recognised authority on experimental music. Despite the bass guitar being her first love (instrumentally speaking), Cat Hope began as a flautist - it was the main instrument through which she achieved her undergraduate degree at the University of Western Australia. She has always been a political animal, and described herself in her university days as being, to all intents and purposes -  “a punk”  - studying classical music by day and attending thrash gigs and engaging in active anarchic action by night.   Yet it was at UWA that Cat's ears were first tuned to new (experimental) music, where she realised that classical and new music are not completely separate…that new classical music is often an outcome of new politi