Meet The Locals: Claire Edwardes is pushing for inclusion in classical music

I'd never really been to Tempe until we started looking to buy a house here around 10 years ago. I remember coming down the end of Unwins Bridge Road and I just couldn't believe that this quiet little pocket between a train line, the Princes Highway and the airport existed. It seemed like an oasis.

I've been playing percussion professionally for over 20 years. Music is something I've always had a passion for, even though my parents weren't musicians and I didn't come from a musical family.

When I was young we lived in regional Victoria, I was 5 and I was going to this really small primary school where there was only one other girl. She played the piano and was a lot older than me and I really wanted to be like her.

I was a pianist from then until I was about 20, but I got into percussion because I wanted to play with other people and the piano is quite a solitary instrument.

The great part about early high school was I kept playing piano and doing focused training so I could understand classical music and get really good at playing it. But then I got to have fun in band rehearsals and play xylophone and timpani really loud and be quite social. It gave me a lot of freedom that piano didn't.

Living in the Netherlands during my formative years, in my mid to late 20s, I had a lot of opportunities to play all over Europe in lots of different ensembles with some amazing musicians. That helped me build my confidence and gain experience I could bring back to Australia.

The vibraphone and the marimba are the main instruments that I play. A more unusual instrument I also play is the aluphone, which I just played on Goat Island as part of the Sydney Festival this year. It was part of a show called Acoustic Life of Boatsheds.

The audience would get into ferries and go around to lots of different destinations on the Harbour and experience music in all these unusual situations. That kind of show can really open people's ears up to listen in new ways.

More traditional classical music is where my background lies but I've always liked playing music by composers who are living and breathing, who I could actually talk to. You can be highly involved in the process of the composition and it's quite a special thing to have music written with you in mind as the performer.

I'm the artistic director for a group called Ensemble Offspring. We call ourselves "Sydney's musical mavericks", we champion music that other people don't tend to play. We're a group of instrumentalists who present a different take on what classical music is.

We get to work with living composers on developing music all together as a team. A lot of those composers are women or First Nations people. We're working hard to achieve gender balance and diversity in classical music programming.

The history of classical music is very male-dominated. Inclusion hasn't even really been discussed much until the last 5 to 10 years, that's why now is such an exciting time. We can see how fast things can change and the arts are an amazing platform to lead that change.

With Ensemble Offspring, we force that change through quotas, being conscious ourselves and calling out people who aren't doing that.

A lot of people would say 'we don't need quotas, it should be about excellence'. But you can't build excellence unless you've had the opportunity to create and have a platform. So it's important to make sure everyone's given an opportunity.

I'm very active in promoting inclusion. I am a Keychange Ambassador and Donne Women in Music Ambassador, they're two European-based organisations really pushing for more diversity in music overseas. I think in Australia we're a little bit behind Europe.

Ensemble Offspring is a partner on a program called Ngarra-Burria alongside the Australian National University, the Australian Music Centre and Mooghalin Performing Arts.

The program's been going for almost six years and it's been a really interesting journey to go from there being almost no First Nations composers of notated orchestral music to having quite a repertoire starting to build up.

There's a thirst for more music by First Nations composers. I feel very fortunate to be part of something which is just starting to take hold and I think there's a really interesting time ahead to see where it ends up."

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