The award-winning songstress will champion community singing through her Queensland Music Festival programme.

The Queensland Music Festival has announced four-time ARIA Award-winner, seven-time platinum selling songstress, Katie Noonan, as its new Artistic Director. Noonan, who is the first Queensland woman to helm the biennial state-wide festival, succeeds Australian jazz icon, James Morrison.

“I live here, and I’ve grown up here, so I want Queenslanders to see and hear their story and feel that this Festival truly represents them,” Noonan said of her curatorial vision for the festival, which will have a strong emphasis on singing. “I want Queenslanders to find their voice. I’m a singer, and I love singing and know how good singing is for you,” Noonan explains “It’s well documented how beneficial singing is for your body, mental state and our sense of community and kinship, but our contemporary society seems to sing together less now.”

The Festival will host events showcasing the full spectrum of music, including classical, jazz, hip hop, RnB, pop and rock, but Noonan will be including a significant amount of community singing as an overarching theme during her first festival in 2017.  

“The generations before mine would often be brought together through song – whether that be at Mass on Sunday, or singing the National Anthem at a sporting event, or just singing around a fire or at the pub. So I want to bring people from all walks of life together to sing,” Noonan shares. “Singing together is like magic: you don’t need to sing well for a large group to sound amazing. I want to have some aspect of community singing at all the events during the festival.”

Noonan has toured extensively across Queensland but admits that there even some areas of the State that she has never been. She hopes that the Festival will help to unite people from across the State and beyond. “QMF is such an enormous event in terms of the distances it covers, but I believe that music is one of the strongest tools in the world for bringing people together, regardless of who, or where or what you are. This Festival engages lots of different communities throughout Queensland through music; it has the ability to break down all barriers.”

The Queensland Premier and Minister for the Arts, Annastacia Palazczuk, share her excitement about the appointment. “Raised and based in Queensland, Katie has built an international profile, but she has always kept close ties to her home state. She is the perfect choice to lead the QMF into its next exciting phase.”