WHEN Luminescence Chamber Singers take the stage at the end of the month, they will do so as a confident professional body, for at last this top music ensemble has achieved ArtsACT funding.

Talking of bodies, their opening concert for 2023 is called “Of The Body,” described as “a musical dissection of sorts [that] traverses sex, sensuality, the senses and more, exploring our relationship to our corporeal form.”

The concert will feature the premiere of a new song cycle by Canberra composer and Luminescence tenor, Dan Walker.

When I catch up with artistic director, AJ America, for coffee, I find her positively abuzz with plans for the coming program, which will see two concerts in Canberra, a return to Wollongong Art Gallery for the first time since 2017 and a performance in the Utzon Room at Sydney Opera House.

It’s a new, augmented line-up for the singers as well, with baritone Lucien Fischer and bass Alasdair Stretch joining the regulars, America as mezzo soprano, Walker as tenor And sopranos Veronica Milroy and Rachel Mink, all under the baton of Roland Peelman.

According to America, the ArtsACT funding now allows them to pay their singers professional rates, putting them on a more solid footing.

“The new line-up sounds more dramatic than it is,” America tells me. Bass Jack Stephens has left to take up a job at St. Paul’s College in Sydney and is being replaced by Stretch, who hasn’t yet moved to Canberra and Fischer has performed with the ensemble before.

The new composition by Walker is a seven-movement secular take on different parts of the body set to text by the greats, including Petrarch and Japanese haiku master Basho.

Some of Walker’s  movements are titled, “Rebel Blood”, “Mouth” and How to Hold A Heart” and represent an interplay between the scientific, the emotional and the anatomical.

“This concert explores how we relate to physical form, so important in a world that is so intensely digital. Hearts still beat. We still bleed,” America says.

“Of The Body,” ANU Drill Hall Gallery. March 30 and All Saints Anglican Church, Ainslie, March 31.