Helen Gifford achieved the distinction of maintaining a continuous stream of commissions for compositions from 1965. Educated at Tintern Junior School and Melbourne Girls Grammar, she received a Commonwealth Scholarship for the music degree course at Melbourne University Conservatorium. There she studied piano with Roy Shepherd and harmony with Dorian Le Gallienne, gaining her Bachelor of Music in 1958. Gifford's Phantasma (1963), for string orchestra, was chosen for submission to the ISCM Festival at Copenhagen. On receiving the First Commission of the Dorian Le Gallienne Award in 1965 she wrote a string quartet that was performed at the 1966 Adelaide Festival. Chimaera (1967) and Imperium (1969), both for large orchestra, were recorded by the ABC. Travel to India in 1967 and Indonesia in 1971 brought the increasing influence of Asian music into her work. Between 1970 and 1982 Gifford received regular commissions to write music for Melbourne Theatre Company productions. Directors included Rick Billinghurst, Tyrone Guthrie (UK), Frank Hauser (UK), Ray Lawler, Bruce Myles, David Myles, Mick Rodger (UK), John Sumner, and Joachim Tenschert (Berliner Ensemble), for plays by Brecht, Congreve, Shaffer, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Stoppard and Tourneur. In 1973 Gifford was awarded a Senior Composer's Fellowship, and in 1974 was appointed Composer-in Residence to the Australian opera. She wrote two substantial music-theatre works on grants from the Music Board of the Australia Council: Regarding Faustus (1983), and Iphigenia in Exile (1985). In 1993 she received a grant from the Edward H. Green Foundation, and in 1995 wrote a work for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, Point of Ignition, while on a Composer Fellowship from the Australia Council. In 1996 she an honorary doctorate of letters from Monash University. In 1999 ABC Classic FM commissioned a piano piece, as foretold to Khayyam, for Michael Kieran Harvey, and the same year she completed a 50-minute work for choir and instruments, Choral Scenes: the Western Front, World War I, commissioned by Astra. Astra performed a later choral work, Catharsis, in 2001. A heightened use of percussive sounds and extended pitch textures characterises Gifford's music, a feature that is especially noticeable in Music for the Adonia (1993), commissioned by the Elision Ensemble.
Web: http://trove.nla.gov.au/people/516639?q&l-occupation=musician&l-birth=1935&c=people (2010)