By Helen Musa

An uncomfortable changing of the guard has taken place at Art Song Canberra, with chair and president Ditta Zizi stepping down and former Canberra International Music Festival director Roland Peelman voted in as president.

Zizi, an opera-trained singer and founding member of Canberra chamber opera company Stopera, had taken over in 2024 from long-time president Oliver Raymond, who stepped down after 29 years. She is also chair of Music for Canberra.

The organisation was originally established as the ACT Lieder Society in 1976 by singer Eleanor Houston.

A community-based society with an ageing committee, the organisation had increasingly relied on Zizi to carry out much of the administrative and curatorial work, Peelman says.

When Zizi found no volunteers willing to join the committee this year, a motion emerged at the recent AGM to disband the organisation, despite, as she told CityNews, Art Song Canberra already having a strong program in place for the year and a “rock solid” bank balance of $60,000.

In the end, new committee members were found, the motion was withdrawn, and Peelman was elected president. He has stated that, under his leadership, the organisation’s funds will be accessed  to hire a part-time administrator.

Zizi says: “Roland and I disagreed, so I stepped aside,” adding that she did not think such a move was appropriate for a community-based organisation.

In Peelman’s view, the situation reflects “a typical story of how small arts organisations, run on volunteer efforts, run out of puff, and/or are defeated by governance regulations, financial systems… and the ever-pressing need to keep on top of social media.”

“I now have to steer this organisation forward,” he says, “but I am optimistic. We are presenting a much broader variety of music… I do not subscribe to the narrow definition of art song – and this can become the axis of a growing national network.”