Margaret Brandman is a respected Australian composer, performer and music educator whose career spans 40 years.
Born in 1951, into a musical family Margaret naturally became fascinated by music. From the age of four she studied accordion and piano, taking up guitar and clarinet in her teens. Her music education was extremely broad, covering many styles and influences and supported by formal studies at the Sydney Conservatorium in piano, clarinet, harmony and composition. She graduated from the Conservatorium High School gaining a position as one of the top three music students in the state of New South Wales.
Winning a scholarship, she attended the University of Sydney, majoring in composition, gaining her Bachelor of Music and at the same time, acquiring her Teacher of Pianoforte Diploma, and the Associate Performer Degree. In recent years Margaret has been awarded the Fellow in Composition, Fellow in Music Education, and Licentiate in Performance by the Australian Society for Musicology and Composition. She has also been awarded the Diploma of Excellence by the World Piano Teacher’s Association for her DVD presentation ‘The Geometry of the Piano and the Symmetry of the Hands’ which showcases both her compositions and her teaching concepts and was presented in 2011 and 2012 in Serbia.
During her career Margaret Brandman has composed a variety of music for a number of genres. Her works range from pieces for various instrumental combinations, including a saxophone quartet and works for string orchestra, to a song cycle and many works for solo piano. Her works have received live performances and have been broadcast on radio. Margaret’s compositions and music education materials are distributed internationally.
She has also combined her pedagogical interests with the composition of collections of interesting teaching pieces for piano students. Many of these pieces are set as examination pieces in Australian examination syllabuses.
In March 2003 Margaret was selected by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, England as ‘International Woman of the Year for services to Music. In 2007 she received a prestigious business award from the Glebe TrueLocal Business awards. In 2012 she received the Australian continent award for Distinguished Intellectual Contributions to the World Forum during which she performed her own compositions at the concert and a gave a lecture on music education for the Arts Symposium.
