Australian Festival of Chamber Music



The Australian Festival of Chamber Music (AFCM) is a ten-day international festival focused on chamber music but also featuring tours of regional and remote Australia, fine food, master classes for musicians and lecture series by international scientists themed on the Great Barrier Reef.

20 to 30 chamber musicians from around the world converge on Townsville, Queensland, each year to perform and teach emerging artists. The festival was founded in July 1991 and has been held annually ever since. It is the largest festival dedicated to chamber music in the southern hemisphere.

Concerts recorded at the Festival are broadcast nationally on ABC Classic FM regularly throughout the following year.

The festival focuses on involving Australian composers and musicians going against contemporary trends in symphony orchestra programming.

The AFCM is presented in partnership with all three levels of government as well as several commercial, tourism, regional development, educational, scientific and media organisations. The festival's patron is Quentin Bryce, Governor of Queensland.

Read more about Australian Festival Of Chamber Music:  History, New General Manager in 2011, Audience, Reef Talk, Winterschool, Outback Tour, Chefs in The North Dinner, Artistic Director

Famous quotes containing the words australian, festival, chamber and/or music:

    Beyond the horizon, or even the knowledge, of the cities along the coast, a great, creative impulse is at work—the only thing, after all, that gives this continent meaning and a guarantee of the future. Every Australian ought to climb up here, once in a way, and glimpse the various, manifold life of which he is a part.
    Vance Palmer (1885–1959)

    Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme, I have tried; I can find no rhyme to “lady” but “baby”Man innocent rhyme; for “scorn,” “horn”Ma hard rhyme; for “school,” “fool”Ma babbling rhyme; very ominous endings. No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    My weary limbs are scarcely stretched for repose, before red dawn peeps into my chamber window, and the birds in the whispering leaves over the roof, apprise me by their sweetest notes that another day of toil awaits me. I arise, the harness is hastily adjusted and once more I step upon the tread-mill.
    —“E. B.,” U.S. farmer. As quoted in Feminine Ingenuity, by Anne L. MacDonald (1992)

    Westminster Abbey is nature crystallized into a conventional form by man, with his sorrows, his joys, his failures, and his seeking for the Great Spirit. It is a frozen requiem, with a nation’s prayer ever in dumb music ascending.
    M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)