She is known for her minimalist, iterative, and lyrical style, for her long-term collaborations with dance choreographers and performers, for her large body of work, and, according to the Globe and Mail, for "blazing a trail for women composers in a notoriously sexist field".
[1] She studied piano with Pierre Souvairan and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto from 1960 to 1963.
[4] In 1977, she created Music Inter Alia, a concert promotion organization in Winnipeg that existed until 1991, with Diana McIntosh.
[2] Southam has been described as having "composed with exacting technique, intent on coaxing warmth out of her machines and bringing electronic music into new spaces".
[4] In the 1980s, Southam began developing an interest in music by American minimalists Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
Her composition Glass Houses[6] (1981) is constructed from short tonal units that combine and re-combine, creating an overall sense of lyricism.
[1]Southam found that minimalist, iterative compositions reminded her of "women's work" – repetitive, monotonous tasks such as knitting and cleaning that nevertheless sustain life.
[1] Southam's favorite quotes about herself were "staggeringly boring" (from the Montreal Gazette), and "a rather shadowy presence on the new-music scene" (from The Globe And Mail).
Southam worked on several collaborative projects with Eve Egoyan throughout the late '90s and early 2000s including: Qualities of Consonance (1998), Figures (2001), In Retrospect (2004), and Simple Lines of Enquiry (2008).
[3][4] The award recognizes her "for her contributions as one of Canada's prominent women composers, known for electronic, acoustic and orchestral works, and as a philanthropist and committed volunteer".
[14] The disc is described as "a continuation of the composer's fascination with very slow, kaleidoscopic transformation of sound using a few very simple chords inside of which a tone row gradually unfolds at the speed of a tulip blossom opening on a warm, sunny spring morning".