Publication date:
6 December 2025
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Astra Travels in Sound and Space:
Eight Decades of Exploratory Music-Making
Music ensembles come and go but Astra is inked deeply into Melbourne’s ongoing cultural fabric.
Through the voices of its extensive network of local and international composer and performer contributors, Astra Travels in Sound and Space plots the 80-year journey of this dynamic contemporary music organisation from its origins as a women’s string orchestra under Asta Flack, through the large choir and orchestral repertoire presented under George Logie-Smith, to the extraordinary 45 years of rich and imaginatively conceived programming under John McCaughey, joined recently by co-director, Andrew Byrne.
Embracing dance, theatre, improvisation, technology and other media in its performance of brand new and little-known older music, Astra’s remarkable body of work and profound influence on Melbourne’s music scene is revealed for the first time, not least in its idiosyncratic exploration of unusual architectural spaces.
About the Authors
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Aline Scott-Maxwell is an ethnomusicologist, musicologist and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow attached to the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University. Her doctoral research was on Southeast Asia, but she has also published extensively on music in Australia, including music and migration. She was Co-General Editor of the ground-breaking Currency Companion to Music and Dance in Australia.
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Musicologist and performer, Maree Macmillan, is a former music educator at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University and a singer, pianist/accompanist/repetiteur, woodwind specialist and conductor. Her interest in intertextual interpretation across music, film, literature and theatre combines the scholarly with the practical—from the operatic to the experimental.
