The Chamber Landscapes concert series at UKARIA, part of the Adelaide Festival, is this year curated by media executive and composer Kim Williams. He tells Limelight about the myriad threads – and multiple generations of Australian composers – that weave through his program.

Kim WilliamsKim Williams

What inspired the combination of music and poetry that threads through your Chamber Landscapes program?

For me poetry is to literature what chamber music is to music. The most intimate example of creative work aimed directly to an audience to captivate the imagination and to evidence beauty, personal reflection and feeling in one of its rarest and most pure creative forms.

A young child said to the Canadian composer R Murray Schafer back in 1970, “poetry is when words sing”. Schafer liked the statement so much he wrote a book with the title “When Words Sing”, one of his many quite exceptional music education guides for teachers.

I am hoping my chosen poems ‘sing’ for the audience as they occur with each of these programs in a matched fashion – sometimes directly referencing something in the program, and at other times with a sensibility of something in the programming.

What were some of the...