Our Composers

Chris Adams

Chris Adams (1979–) is a New Zealand composer and is the Director of Performance Music at Auckland Grammar School. He was the Mozart Fellow (2010–2011) at the University of Otago and the Auckland Philharmonia’s Composer in Residence (2009). Chris was the inaugural University of Otago Wallace Arts Trust Artist in Residence at the Pah Homestead from July to September, 2010, a position he held again in 2011.

As a composer, Chris has worked with a wide variety of soloists and groups including the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Auckland Philharmonia. His music has been performed around New Zealand, and in Australia, Britain, Hong Kong, Italy and Vietnam.

Robert Allworth

Born in 1943, Robert Allworth was a keen student of piano and theory of music at school. He did not, however, decide to take up composition seriously until his late teens

Recognition came in 1965 when the ISCM selected a sonata for piano for performance in Stockholm. Since then there have been many public performances of Robert Allworth's chamber and solo works. As a member of the Fellowship of Australian Composers and producer of Jade Records, Robert Allworth has been responsible for producing more than75 CDs of the music of his fellow composers. He was recognised for his efforts in the promotion of contemporary music by being awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1997.

Andrew Ball

Andrew Ball enjoys a diverse career as a saxophonist and composer. With a uniquely kinetic and
colourful compositional voice, Andrew draws from an eclectic variety of contemporary, improvised,
and electronic musics. Andrew has recently composed for ensembles including Barega Sax Quartet,
The Australia Ensemble, Hourglass Ensemble, and Queensland Youth Orchestras. In 2017, Andrew
launched his ongoing solo project with the release of his album Forbidden Languages, a suite of
genre-defying original works for extended and prepared saxophones. Andrew is an advocate of
new Australian music, and has premiered works, both as a performer and composer, at events
including at the three most recent World Saxophone Congress, SuperSounds (Brisbane), Tilde New
music festival (Melbourne), and Melbourne International Saxophone Festival.

Ros Bandt

  Dr Ros Bandt is an internationally acclaimed sound artist, composer, musician, researcher and scholar. Since 1977 she has pioneered interactive sound installations, sound sculptures, and created sound playgrounds, aeolian harps spatial music systems, and some 40 sound installations worldwide. She has curated many sound performances, exhibitions and events. Her original works are recorded on New Albion Records (USA), Move Records (Melbourne), EMI/ABC, Wergo (Germany), Ars Acoustica, Double Moon (Turkey), Pozitif Müzik Yapim, Hearing Places, Sonic Gallery and Bedroom Suck Records.

Ros Bandt is a multi-instrumentalist, and has been a founding member of many ensembles and collaborations including the early music ensemble la Romanesca, the cross-cultural Back to Back Zithers, the improvisatory LIME, and the baroque trio Trio Avium. She is an expert recorder player and teacher having studied in Basel Switzerland with Andreas Küng, in Spain with Baldrick Deerenberg, and in Australia with Ruth Wilkinson. She is a passionate advocate of the long necked tarhu, a bowed spike fiddle invented by Australian luthier Peter Biffen. For a decade she has collaborated internationally with this instrument culminating in a double CD Tarhu Connections, available through hearing places website. Her CD and bandcamp  catalogue is at Hearingplaces.

Bandt is a prolific writer on sound and her book, Sound Sculpture: Intersections in Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, (Fine Arts Press) is the first audio visual profile of Australian sound art. She is an honorary senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she directs The Australian Sound Design Project, the first online sound art gallery, searchable data-base and web site merging sound art practice with academic research. Since 2019, she has taught advanced improvisation for the masters in musical composition course at Box Hill Institute. She is in demand as a keynote speaker on sound, here and internationally.

Greg Bartholomew

Greg Bartholomew's music has been performed across the United States and in Canada, Europe and Australia. His choral works have been performed by such ensembles as Seattle Pro Musica, The Esoterics, the Oregon Repertory Singers, Octarium, Austin Vocal Arts Ensemble, and the Oratorio Society of Minnesota. The Ars Brunensis Chorus recording of his choral settings From the Odes of Solomon is available on CD by Capstone Records. Connecticut Choral Arts (Concora) released The 21st Century (A Girl Born in Afghanistan) on their 2007 CD "Songs and Stories of Liberation."

Commissioned by the Oregon Bach Festival Composer's Symposium in celebration of George Crumb's 75th birthday, Bartholomew's String Trio for George Crumb was premiered by Third Angle in July 2004 and will be released on CD by the Langroise Trio in April 2008. His instrumental work The Far North Land: Passages for violas in six parts was selected for performance at the 30th International Viola Congress in June 2002. A version of the same work for string quartet was premiered by the OdeonQuartet at Seattle's Town Hall in October 2003. That concert also featured the premiere of Bartholomew's Suite for Razumov (Act One), for clarinet and string quartet, which was subsequently recorded by members of the Kiev Philharmonic for release on the "Masterworks of the New Era" CD series. On the Ground Where We Live was awarded the Masterworks Prize by ERM Media and was recorded by the Czech Republic for the "Masterworks of the New Era" CD series.

Paul Bruer

Paul Bruer is a member of Adelaide's Sylvan Players, a group of 15 who play free at venues ranging from schools, churches, nursing homes and seniors clubs, introducing recorder music (from medieval to contemporary) to audiences. Paul plays recorders, crumhorns and flute and has composed many pieces for the group's performances since he joined in 1994.

Diana Blom

Diana Blom is a composer an keyboard player and undertakes small research projects. She teaches music performance, music education and music writing concepts in the School of Contemporary Arts, University of Western Sydney.

Donald Bousted

Donald Bousted is a composer with an international reputation. His music has been played throughout the UK, in America, Germany, France, Czechoslovakia and Croatia and broadcast on national radio in the UK and France. His music for recorder is published by Moeck Verlag, as well as Orpheus Music, and has recorded on CD by Kathryn Bennetts and Peter Bowman. His organ piece A Woldgate Requiem has recently been released on a CD of new music for organ by the highly acclaimed organist Kevin Bowyer.

Donald was born in 1957 in Luton in the UK. He studied composition with Philip Cannon at the Royal College of Music and Margaret Lucy Wilkins at the University of Huddersfield. He won the Cobbett Prize for Composition at the RCM in 1981. He is a co-author of The Quarter-Tone Recorder Manual (Moeck, 1998) and is the Artistic Director of Ensemble QTR (Quarter-Tone Recorder). This group have recently been described as 'the UK's most exciting microtonal ensemble'(Barbican Centre, London). Notable recent performances include A Woldgate Requiem at the St. Albans International Organ Festival; Dance of Leilah: Dance of Lilith at St. John's Smith Square; A Journey Among Travellers at the Berkeley Music Festival, California, USA; The Evolution of Line at Musicora 97, Paris; and The Dream at the Old Academy in Prague and The Purcell Room, London. Donald's most recent commission was Tears, for the tuba quartet Tubalaté (funded by Arts 4 Everyone). As well as writing music Donald has had a varied career as guitarist, conductor and teacher. He studied the guitar with Antonio Albanes and conducting with Harry Newsome at the Guildhall School of Music and trained to be a teacher at Durham University. He is presently a lecturer in Composition at the University of Huddersfield. Donald has also written for BBC TV, video and theatre.

Nigel Butterley

Nigel Butterley was born in Sydney in 1935 is regarded as one of the leading composers of his generation. His output includes the orchestral Meditations of Thomas Traherne (1968) and From Sorrowing Earth (1991), a violin concerto, four string quartets and other chamber music, vocal choral, piano and other instrumental works, and the opera Lawrence Hargrave Flying Alone (1988). Among recent major works are The Woven Light, a cycle of poems of Kathleen Raine for soprano and orchestra (1994), and Spell of Creation (2000) for soloists, choir and orchestra. His radiophonic choral work In the Head the Fire was awarded the Italia Prize in 1966. 

After being a member of the music staff of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for some years, Nigel Butterley became a lecturer in contemporary music at Newcastle Conservatorium in 1973. Afterwards, he was a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Music at the University of Newcastle. He retired in 1991 and is currently a Visiting Professor. He holds an honorary doctorate in music from the same university, and is a Member of the Order of Australia.

Zana Clarke

Zana Clarke is a recorder specialist, active in the areas of performance, teaching and composition. She performs both as a soloist and with Nardoo, has recorded eight CDs and been involved in many ABC live broadcasts. 

Zana has explored new ways of approaching recorder technique and it's role in many different media. She has also written works for solo recorder from beginners through to advanced players. Several of these compositions include vocalised recorder, a new technique she is developing whereby two individual melodic lines are sounded simultaneously by the one player (voice and recorder). Many of these pieces have been published and recorded. 

More about Zana Clarke

Racheal Cogan

Racheal Cogan has devoted her life so far to performing and studying music, finding teachers to show her the way, and travelling around the world studying and performing with many masters. 

In the last few years she has been studying Persian music with nei player and singer Hossein Omoumi in France, performing with Kurdish musician Fardin Karamkhani in the United States, and briefly in South India studying Karnatic music with mridangam player Karaikudi R Mani. Racheal studied, performed and recorded with Ross Daly and his ensemble Labyrinth throughout Greece, Turkey and Macedonia from 2000?2002. In Australia she co-founded the haBiBis in 1993 who performed traditional Greek music. Their second CD intoxication received an ARIA (Australian Record Industry Award) in 1999.

Miggs Coggan

Miggs Coggan lives in Armidale NSW, and has worked with children for many years, teaching classroom music, creative dance, recorder, piano and early childhood music. She has been very much influenced by the teachings of Carl Orff and Dalcroze, and blends these ideas with her own. The music she has written to date has always been for her students to perform. It includes piano solos, accompanied songs, musicals and, more recently, original recorder ensembles.

Recorder was something learnt at Teachers College, but when it came time to teach it in schools, Miggs took lessons with Bernard Williams and then at a later date with Zana Clarke. Miggs now plays with an adult recorder ensemble, takes beginner adults in group classes. Her composition Kurrawongs won the inaugural Australian National Recorder Composition award in 2000.

Jonathan Crehan

Jonathan Crehan (NZ) is an emerging composer who likes to write classical music which is exciting and fun to listen to. He isn't afraid to use either modern-day composition techniques or traditional, and loves to focus on the mood of the piece, and its effect on the listener. Jonathan began composing at 8 years old, and started his first private lessons with the highly esteemed conductor and composer, Sir William Southgate, at the age of 16. He completed his Bmus in Composition at Victoria University of Wellington in 2007, and spent the next year doing more intense private study. In 2008, Jonathan Crehan was the winner of the 7th ADAM International Cello Festival Young Composer Competition as well as the 2008 Orpheus Publications Composition Competition. Jonathan's interests lie somewhere between composition, conducting and orchestration, and is keen to become consummate at all three.

Justo Diaz

Justo Diaz was born in Buenos Aires and moved to Australia in 1979. In 1980 he formed Papalote, a group which has been at the forefront of the movement towards multiculturalism. Diaz is its main arranger and composer, presenting a huge variety of Latin American music from Andean folk music to the African rhythms of the Caribbean. In 1984 Diaz was awarded an International Study Grant by the Australia Council, to spend time in Latin America and bring back a unique collection of instruments and experiences to share in music workshops. He has recorded the CD Papalote Chiselled in Stone with Larrikin Records.

Howard Dillon

Howard Dillon is a composer, violinist and teacher. He has a Masters degree in composition from La Trobe University. His interests in composition extend to electro-acoustic music and sound installations, as well as more traditional instrumental composition. Since 1997, he has organised the Elbow Room Concert Series highlighting the work of Melbourne composers in non-traditional venues. His music has been performed by the Astra Music Society, the Melbourne Composers' League, Monash University and as part of the Asian Music Festival in Bangkok and at the Meetings of New Music Festival in Rumania. He has had his Sound Installations exhibited at the Linden Gallery in Melbourne and at the National Gallery of Victoria.

Kym Dillon

Kym Dillon is a composer, pianist, conductor and presenter based in Geelong and Melbourne. Starting out her early career as a performing jazz pianist, Kym’s unwavering curiosity about music soon led her to composition and art music as a primary focus. Kym completed a Bachelor of Music Performance Honours in Practical Composition at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2012, during which she was awarded the Beleura Sir George Tallis Award from the 'Friends of the VCA' in 2009; and the Beleura John Tallis Award in 2010. Kym also composed and performed two original jazz works for the VCA’s Improvisation Series in 2009, for which her ensemble won the 'Athanaeum Prize’.

Having since had original works commissioned by such organisations as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Australian Youth Orchestra, Astra Chamber Music Society and Musica Viva, Kym now regularly composes for a wide range of ensembles and contexts. Her work has been performed in Canada, the U.K., North America, Romania and Italy, and is often inspired by reflections on the nature of imagination, creation and art — what it means to create and what our creative compulsion says about us.

Kym currently resides in Geelong, enjoying juggling work as a composer, arranger, pianist, accompanist, composition/theory teacher and choral conductor.

Click here to see Kym's website.

Roman Molino Dunn

Roman Molino Dunn, is a devoted eccentric concentric contrapuntist. He is completely and obsessively concerned with counterpoint (the inter-weaving of multiple melodies into one beautiful musical composition) and the nature of suspensions and ornamentations. But above all, he believes the point of writing music is to capture beauty so that it may be forever found. Roman Molino Dunn graduated from Moravian Academy Highschool in 2003, and has recently completed his joint Bachelors and Master's Degree (BA/MA) in Music Composition at Hunter College in NYC. He is in an accelerated degree program that allows qualified students the opportunity to complete both their undergraduate and graduate work all in four years. Roman Molino Dunn's Prelude and Offering is currently published by Gold Branch Music (http://www.goldbranchmusic.com). Roman was the recipient of the 2005 Libby Van Arsdale Memorial Scholarship Prize in Music Theory/History (from Hunter College). Also the winner of the 2002 MCAC YME Award for his Song Cycle "4 Facets" (Awarded by the Monroe County Arts Council of PA). He was the recipient of the 2006 Orpheus Music Composition Competition (New South Wales, Australia) recorder ensemble award. Roman studied composition foremost with Shafer Mahoney and Christopher Theofanidis. He has also studied with Allen Anderson, Michael Annicchiarico, Poundie Burstein, Mark Spicer, and mathematics and computation in counterpoint with John Rogers. While in high school Roman studied with Jenny Collins, Gail Grossman, Eric Doney, and Neil Wetzel. He has tutored in counterpoint, harmony, and keyboard proficiency both privately, and for undergraduate Hunter University music students. He recently composed the music for Douglas Morse's (of Grandfather Films) movie, The Summoning of Everyman. His piece In Memory of Paul F. Gilligan III was performed in October of 2006 at a dedication hosted by the Paul F. Gilligan III Foundation. His sacred works have been performed in local NYC churches, most notably Church of the Holy Cross (W. 42nd St.). Roman presented his paper Discrete Melodic Set Theory: Abstract Algebraic Approach to Counterpoint at the 2007 Conference of the Society for Mathematics and Computation in Music in Berlin, Germany. Roman works as a music transcriber, copyist, and engraver for hire in the NYC area.

Lance Eccles

Lance Eccles is one of Australia?s leading composers for recorder ensemble and his music has gained considerable popularity around the world. He has been able to bring to life music of Non-Western origins in a very individual and accessible manner. Lance has been a member of the Reluctant Consort, a Sydney-based recorder group, since 1982, and many of his recorder compositions and arrangements have been written either for that group, meetings of the Sydney Society of Recorder Players or Batalla Famossa. By profession he is a senior lecturer in Chinese at Macquarie University.

More about Lance Eccles

Ross Edwards

Ross Edwards was born in 1943 and lives and works in Sydney. He is regarded as one of Australia's most distinguished composers.

For more than two decades his commitment to the ideal of music as a positive and regenerative force within society has led him to explore beyond the confines of Western Art Music. His distinctive sound-world interfuses shapes and patterns from nature with a variety of musical resources which reflect and celebrate Australia's cultural diversity. 

In his maninya (dance-chant) pieces, Edwards has pursued an ideal of wholeness a reintegration of mind, body and spirit and a restoration to 'serious' music of such qualities as lightness, spontaneity and the impulse to dance. Another side of his creativity is expressed in his 'sacred' or 'contemplative' pieces, which are characterised by by a timeless austerity much influenced by bird song and the mysterious polyphony of the insect chorus of the Australian bush. 

Edwards is perhaps best known for his orchestral music. He has also written extensively for chamber ensembles, for dance and for film. His music has been widely recorded and recordings and pieces have received a number of awards and prizes. 

Ross Edwards has twice been awarded an Australia Council Creative Fellowship and in 1997 he was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to music as a composer. Ulpirra was commissioned in 1993 by Jo Dudley, who has recorded it on the CD Ecstatic Dances: Ross Edwards' Chamber Music Volume One, Tall Poopies Records (TP051). 

More about Ross Edwards

Robyn Ellis

Robyn has had a passion for all things recorder since her Primary School days in Forbes NSW. She currently lives in Tenterfield where she teaches music at Tenterfield High School. Since 1997 she has composed for and performed with the folk group Random Selection who appear regularly at festivals in the local area. Her nephew's 11th birthday inspired her first composition for recorder and piano

Winsome Evans

Winsome Evans plays more instruments than is decent, ranging from the harpsichord to the psaltery, gemshorn and cornetto. In 1966 she founded the Renaissance Players, Australia's first professional early music group for whom she has composed and arranged about 2500 pieces. The Renaissance Players repertoire covers medieval, renaissance and baroque music as well as various folk traditions. They have released six LPs and 11 CDs with more in the pipeline.

As a harpsichordist (always armed with an apple) she has performed with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Sydney Baroque and many other groups, and she has been a session musician for a number of films.

Winsome is an associate professor at the University of Sydney where she teaches aspects of composition and musical history including historical performance practice. She also manages to annoy the faceless bureaucrats who don't understand that fun and creativity are not incompatible with rigorous scholarship.

She has composed and arranged music for many ABC radio features (including Watership Down) and for TV documentary programs. She has been awarded a BEM and OAM for services to music.

Russell Gilmour

Russell Gilmour (born Sydney, 1956) commenced tertiary studies in music at the relatively late age of 23 at the University of New England, Armidale where he studied composition with Ann Ghandar and Graeme Koehne. After graduating, Gilmour spent twelve years teaching both primary and secondary school classroom music. He was Director of the Bathurst Chamber Orchestra from 1988 to 1990. In 1994 he moved to Tasmania and gave up full-time teaching to devote more time to composition. His music has been performed by the Queensland, Tasmanian and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, the Queensland Philharmonic, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and numerous other ensembles. Russell Gilmour is currently lecturer in orchestration and arranging at the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music; Artistic Administrator of the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra Council; and Arts Events Panel Member, Department of State Development, Arts Tasmania.

Katia Geha

Katia is an 18-year-old composer who began studying classical piano from the age of three. From here, she developed a passion for classical music and performing. Katia began composing at the beginning of high school, and at twelve she began to play the oboe, leading her to have a deeper passion for works written for both orchestra and wind symphonies. In 2017, Katia travelled on a music tour to Europe, performing in venues including St Peter’s Basilica and the Slovenian caves in Postojna. Between 2018 and 2019, she performed with the UNSW Wind Symphony, as well as doing a number of musicals and performances. From here, although Katia loved performing, there was something new and intriguing about composing that she just missed from simply just performing. At the beginning of 2020, Katia began to attend the Sydney Conservatorium of Music studying a Bachelor of Music (Composition), and as of September 2020 she was a recipient of the Artology Open Fanfare Competition in which her work was performed by the Queensland Youth Chamber Orchestra.

Quentin Grant

Quentin Grant is an Adelaide-based composer. He is involved in a wide range of musical activities in different genres including rock, folk and orchestral music. He is one of the organisers of ACME New music. 

In 1985 and 1987 he received South Australian Young Composers awards and has recently been composer in residence for the ASO and at the ASME biennial conference.

William Green

William Green lives in Auckland, New Zealand, and has worked there and in Australia as a pianist in a variety of fields, including dance, theatre, opera and silent film. He is also a recitalist, poet, teacher and occasional lecturer. His compositions include piano, chamber, choral and orchestral music, as well as a comic opera and music for theatre. His "Three Glimpses" for flute and piano (1997) featured in an anthology of New Zealand flute music.

Fran Griffin

Fran Griffin began life as a flute player, studying at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia, with renowned teachers Margaret Crawford and Michael Scott. Although composing since the age of seven, she put aside composition in favour of an interest in early music performance practice, studying baroque fute and recorder with Howard Oberg. After a number of years working as a freelance musician, she returned to study, completing M.Sc. (Hons) in mathematics at Macquarie University, Sydney in 1999. Here she remained on staff until 2012, when she left Sydney to live in country NSW. Here she has renewed her previous life as a musician, teaching flute, clarinet and bassoon and performing once again with early music ensemble Nouvelles Réfexions and flute quartet Eclectix.

Fran has renewed here interest in composition, finding a need to produce many arrangements and original works for students and for community concert bands and choir. Her more serious compositions include arrangements and new works for flute quartet, flute duo, and other chamber combinations with flute, bassoon duo, clarinet ensemble, string trio, symphonic winds, and choral works. She has received several awards for composition, and her works have been published in Portugal, Italy, Belgium, USA and Australia.

Andrei Hadap

Andrei Hadap is a pianist, composer, and music teacher. He started learning the piano at age ten and is completing his Bachelor of Music (Performance Honours) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music under Stephanie McCallum and is a recipient of several academic awards. Andrei made his orchestral debut in 2018 with the Penrith Symphony Orchestra performing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. More recently, he has taken up the area of historical performance, studying early keyboard and continuo under Erin Helyard. In 2021, he was nominated for the inaugural Pinchgut Continuo Mentorship Program to refine his skills as a conductor and continuo player. Andrei also specialises in the revival of historic improvisation, composition and pedagogy from the common practice period, the subject of his Honours thesis, “From the Maestro’s Living Voice”.

David Hamilton

David Hamilton (b.1955) was Head of Music at Epsom Girls Grammar School until the end of 2001 where he conducted the award-winning girls choir Opus. He has been Deputy Music Director of Auckland Choral (1996-2011) and Composer-in-Residence with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (1999). He maintains part-time involvement in music education as a composition tutor and choral conductor.

He is well-known as a choral composer and conductor, workshop leader and adjudicator. His choral music is widely performed, and is published in the UK, USA, Germany, Spain and Finland. His music has won numerous composer competitions in New Zealand, and also in Italy (2000), the USA (2005, 2006, 2008, 2016 and 2019), Israel (2007), and the UK (2008). In 2018 he was awarded the annual SOUNZ Community Commission and in 2019 was a winner in the Atlanta Contemporary Ensemble’s composer competition. In 2020 “Night Songs III” won the Delta Omicron Composition Competition (USA), choral works took 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in the IX Amadeus International Choral Composition Competition 2020 (Spain), and “Canticle 6: Fragments from Lorca” won the Philip Neill Memorial Prize in Music (NZ).

Click here to see David's Website.

John Hardy

John Hardy (b. 1963) spent his early years in Bondi, Sydney, and while still a schoolboy began working professionally as a piano accompanist as well as being employed as an organist and choirmaster. Many of his own compositions in the fields of chamber music, and secular and sacred choral music received public performances at this time. He was admitted to the Sydney University BMus course in 1982 and over the next three years studied composition with Eric Gross, Winsome Evans and Peter Sculthorpe. He moved to Western Australia in 1988 and with his wife, flautist and musicologist Dr Emily Gunson, he performs regularly in chamber music recitals as a pianist and harpsichordist. Over recent years he has returned to his compositional activities with a series of critically acclaimed sonatas and songs, which reflect his melodic gift framed in elegantly classical sonata structures.

Trevor Holton

Trevor Holton is a violinist, havin worked in symphony orchestras in Australia and UK and recording sessions, TV variety and film music. He is now a teacher living on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. He has composed works for solo instruments, ensembles and orchestra. He also arranges for school orchestras on demand.

Okavango was inspired by his daughter's school geography project on the inland delta in Botswana, Africa.

Dale Jones

Dale Jones was born in Ipswich, Queensland in 1962 and has had a rich and varied musical career as a performer, composer and teacher. As an orchestral double bass player for twenty years he worked with the Tasmanian, Melbourne and Queensland Symphony Orchestras. In addition to this he has maintained a keen interest in composing and songwriting having produced three albums of original music as well as composing music for film, theatre and small ensembles.

Dale has also spent many years as an educator and is currently teaching strings and directing ensembles at the Samford Valley Steiner School near Brisbane.

Luigi Antonio Irlandini

Luigi Antonio Irlandini (1958), composer and pianist, has studied in Brazil, Italy and the USA. He studied with Franco Donatoni in Italy and Brian Ferneyhough in California, among other teachers, and received his PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara.

Agnistoma II was commisioned by Musica Riservata Association, Milan, Italy for the 1998 festival Simboli E Allegorie Del Sacro Nella Musica Strumentale Antice E Contemporanea.

Agnistoma II is a polyphonic elaboration of the rhythmic-melodic materials in Agnistoma I, a piece for voice, two soprano recorders, and didjeridu, on a hymn from the Rig Veda, and sung in Sanskrit. Both pieces may be performed as two separate pieces or as a two-movement work entitled simply Agnistoma. Agnistoma means 'praise of fire'.

Jason Jeffery

Jason Jeffery is currently completing a Diploma of Education at Monash University, Clayton Campus. Previously he completed his Bachelor of Music with Honours in Performance and Composition, also at Monash University. There he studied jazz guitar under James Wilson and composition under Thomas Reiner. Jason has studied music since he entered high school, where his first instrument was the alto saxophone. He then moved onto piano and finally to guitar, which is now his principal instrument. As a member of various bands and ensembles he has appeared and participated at many festivals and concerts, receiving awards for his efforts. 

Jason has performed with ensembles such as: Funktional, The Jazz Trio, Groove Force and Past Echoes. He has also been a member of the Monash University choir, Viva Voce, and represented the choir on their 1997 tour of Japan. His compositions are diverse in style and have been described as having a witty sense of humour by his peers. In the future Jason would like to promote his work both as performer and composer and become part of the larger musical community.

Zachariah Jones is a 16-year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist. He has played oboe and cor anglais in Queensland Youth Symphony (QYS) in 2020 and as a part of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra (QSO) prodigy program (2019). He has also arranged pieces for the Australian Double Reed Society (ADRS). He hopes to improve and further his study of composition.

Tim Knight

Tim was born in Northallerton, North Yorkshire in 1959, subsequently becoming a chorister at York Minster under Dr Francis Jackson. He later studied choral conducting under the direction of the late John Coates.

This excellent grounding in choral music together with his dynamic style and approach has led him to conducting engagements in the UK, Canada, USA and Norway as well as being the resident director of music for three Yorkshire choirs. As a composer his work includes choral, vocal, instrumental and orchestral works, in which he strives for "melodic music that will appeal to performers and musicians." He has earned composition awards from the Royal School of Church Music and the Oare International Composers Competition. He has over 90 works currently in print in the UK and USA; and performances have taken place in Canada, the USA, Norway, Holland, Ukraine and New Zealand.

Tim has two young sons and lives in Leeds, but retreats to the peaceful Yorkshire Dales for composing!

Rupert Kirby

Rupert Kirby lives in Lynton, North Devon, England with his wife, Olwyn and children, Gemma and Martyn.

As a child he was born into a musical family, a distant relative of Ralph Vaughan Williams and grandson of the Bassoon Composer Geoffrey Hartley. He developed his skills in the church choir and the Kent Music School, gaining a music scholarship to King's Taunton.

His teaching career started with a post as bass singer and teacher of maths and English at the Abbey Choir school in Tewkesbury. More recently he filled the post of Head of Music at Minehead Middle School, where he develops musical opportunities for youth, running the West Somerset Junior Orchestra and a plethora of different choral and instrumental groups. In this capacity he has written works for junior orchestra, strings and individual pieces for particularly talented members of the groups he runs. He has also been involved in the West Country's folk music scene as a member of the Folk Group 'Hearts of Oak'.

Rupert enjoys canoeing, having been a canoe instructor in the Ardeche, Southern France, whilst a student, and now regularly takes to the North Devon coast and rivers with his son, Martyn in plastic kayaks.

Clive Lane

Clive Lane is a Sydney composer who specialises in music for small ensembles, band music and choral music. He is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium (BMus, majoring in clarinet) and the University of NSW (MMus). During his many years as a high school music educator he was able to compose and arrange for a variety of musical ensembles. Eventually he decided to concentrate full time on performance (classical guitar, viola da gamba, singing) and composition. 

Early music is one of his great loves and he has been playing in viol consorts for many years. His arrangement of Pavane by Daniel Bacheler for five viols was published in the Viola da Gamba Society of America VdGSA NewsVol. LIV, No.2, Summer 2017.

Saraband Music has published two other pieces for viols: an arrangement of ‘Tower Hill’ by Giles Farnaby and an original piece: ‘Variations on Barbara Allen’s Cruelty’, both pieces for four viols.

These and other pieces for viols have received public performances by the Sydney group Consort 8 (https://consortviii.wordpress.com/).

His concert band music is in the repertoire of several Sydney concert bands, his ‘Pavane’ for brass band piece was played for the opening of the Sir John Monash Centre at Villers-Bretonneux (France) in 2018 and the Sydney Mandolin Orchestra has performed his arrangements and original pieces.  

His pieces for recorder ensemble have been played in many Sydney concerts.

Vocal music is a great love and he has sung in many choirs, singing for the last four years with Sydney choir Bel a cappella (http://www.belacappella.org.au/)

His vocal arrangements are in the repertoire of the Sydney Trade Union Choirand Choir Rocks.

As a guitarist he attained the AMusA award in 1998 and has since given numerous concerts, performing with the Concordia Guitar Trioin Sydney for three years. Compositions for the guitar include solo works, guitar duets, and works for guitar and other instruments and are published by Wirripang Music.

Sr Marie Duchesne Lavin

Sr Marie Duchesne Lavin (b. 1930) is a Catholic nun who has spent most of her life involved in music education. She has taught privately and in schools and teachers colleges in Australia, and Papua New Guinea and completed courses in the USA and Hungary. While in PNG she researched traditional music and collected and transcribed two volumes of it.

Beverley Lea

Beverley Lea lives in Armidale NSW Australia. Her recorder compositions are Pages From a Book (1997) (Tenor recoder), Desert Night (1998) (Tenor recorder), Dark Grey;Spun Gold (2000) (Quartet D,Tr,T,B) and Through the Trees (2001) (Bass recorder). A piano composition, Embers (1997) can be heard on The Australian Piano Music CD From Rags to Recollections played by Renate Turrini, Nea 003.

Tony Lewis

Tony Lewis is a percussionist and composer who has performed with many of Australia's leading contemporary and cross-cultural music, dance and theatre groups. He has worked with Sangam, B'tutta, Southern Crossings, Ariel, Nakisa, Tala Vadya Kacheri, REM Theatre and in duos with Sandy Evans, Matthew Doyle and Satsuki Odamura. His compositions have appeared on recordings by several of these groups/artists.

Fiona Loader

Fiona Loader is a freelance musician – accompanist, singer, and composer – a Master’s graduate in Composition from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She has held the position of composer in residence at Trinity Grammar School in Sydney and has had many works commissioned and performed by ensembles such as the Halcyon Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, and the Leichhardt Espresso Chorus and for advent 2020, the Choir of Christ Church St. Laurence. A recent work, Lorikeet Corroboree, has recently been released on ABC Classics on the album “Songbirds” performed by Ensemble Offspring.

In 2019/2020 Fiona had the opportunity to work with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music based recorder consort, “The Judgment of Paris” and they invited her to write a work for their concert and CD repertoire. The resulting work is the “Rose Garden Suite” – a set of three movements based on the theme of walking and relaxing.

Richard Peter Maddox

Richard Peter Maddox is resident in Armidale, where he conducts the Armidale Vocal Ensemble and the Chapel Choir at The Armidale Schools. He has composed many works for voice and piano, some of which have been recorded by Samantha Cobcroft for the Move label. His most recent publication is a set of Songs for Young Singers. He has also written many instrumental and orchestral pieces.

Connor Pendlebury

Connor Pendlebury is a 2nd year composition student at the Sydney Conservatorium of music.  His compositional output is characterised by the use of traditional forms and concepts combined with a modern eclecticism.  He has composed numerous pieces for piano in addition to several string quartets, a saxophone quartet, a piano trio, as well as several orchestral pieces.

Martin Pervan

For over 20 years Marty has performed as a musician on Trumpet, Trombone, Sousaphone and Flute, Alto, Tenor and Baritone Saxophones, taught brass, theory, composition and improvisation in several primary and secondary schools, directed large and small school and community ensembles including the Western Australian Youth Jazz Orchestra, Fremantle Jazz Orchestra and Swing Shift Big Band. Marty’s musical versatility has enabled him to engage in a diverse range of genres including New Orleans style brass, Latin, Jazz (small to large groups), Reggae, Ska, dub, funk/soul, classical ensembles of all sizes, as well as his own original music for quartet, sextet, and big band.

He often plays with his own Latin group, “Nueva Salsa Orchestra”, local Symphony Orchestras and is also in high demand as a session musician appearing on over 50 recordings as a performer, and or composer and arranger. As well as musically directing local music theatre productions, he is a regular part of the pool of pit musicians hired for international touring musical productions – most recently the Perth season of “Hair”, Tim Minchin’s “Matilda” and the Disney touring production of “Aladdin”.

Richard Percival L.T.C.L, Mus. Bac. (Canterbury), A.D.J.S ( Sydney)

Born in New Zealand in 1953 Richard Percival moved to Sydney Australia, after completion of Bachelor of Music Degree at Canterbury University, to complete an Associate Diploma in Jazz Studies at Sydney University. Further studies took place in Los Angeles and New York with Victor Morosco (woodwinds) and Abbe Frazer (Counterpoint). Mr. Percival has been a professional woodwind doubler (saxophones, clarinets, flutes) for over fifty years, working in areas as diverse as symphony orchestras, television shows, recording studios, theatre orchestras, Afro –Cuban bands, and other ensembles. He has toured with such people as Maria Schneider, Bob Florence, Natalie Cole, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Newton –John, Cleo Laine, Sarah Brightman, Howard Keel and many others. He has been a prominent educator producing the Teacher On Tap series of Learning Modules for Woodwinds as well as many ensemble pieces for woodwinds, brass, string ensembles and percussion.

As a composer he has written for ensembles as diverse as string orchestras, big bands, various woodwind ensembles, Afro-Cuban ensembles and vocal ensembles. He won “First Place for the Nation” in the Maurice Ravel International Composition Competition 2017,2018.He also won First Prize in the Universal Marimba Competition in Belgium earlier in 2021.Performers of his compositions include The Sydney Wind Quintet, The Bourbaki Ensemble, The Sydney Jazz Orchestra, The Sydney All Stars, The Sydney Conservatorium Saxophone Orchestra, The Kerrie Biddel Singers and individuals including Ken Peplowski and Paquito D’Rivera. He currently resides in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney where he continues to teach and compose.

David Pye

David Pye is a composer, percussionist and conductor working principally in dance, theatre, and music for youth and amateurs. He graduated with distinction from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1980 with a B.A (Music) and the Gwen Nisbet Music Scholarship. Resident in Western Australia since 1981, David has been involved in all aspects of classical and contemporary music-making in Perth: as conductor, composer, percussionist, chorister, teacher, orchestral manager, entrepreneur and administrator.

In 1983 he founded the Nova Ensemble to perform the classical music of the twentieth century and has overseen the development of the group into Western Australia's leading contemporary music ensemble - involved in commissioning, writing, performing and recording music. In 1985 David was first invited to conduct for the West Australian Ballet, and in the following year joined the company as Resident Conductor. In 1989 David turned to composition with works being commissioned since then for Nova Ensemble, Buzz Dance Theatre, Chrissie Parrott Dance Company, Festival of Perth and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation amongst others.

From 1988 to 1996, David was Musical Director of the West Australian Mandolin Orchestra. Appointed Musical Director of the Fremantle Symphony Orchestra in 1998, his programming for both orchestras reflects a policy of the encouragement of Australian composers combined with a practical acknowledgement of the importance of audience and orchestra enjoyment of their music-making.

David's major compositional influences include Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Reich, Glass, Bill Fontana, Dr L Subramaniam and Mark Cain. A keen interest in the music of India (particularly the Carnatic Music and temple musics of South India) and Western Java is permeating his compositional style. The use of music technology in combination with both the low-tech contemporary instruments designed and built by Nova Ensemble and the traditional instruments of various world cultures is defining the aural space in which David's music exists.

Tallis Fiore

Justin Montefiore (Newcastle) has been composing for over twenty years. Since 1992 he has taught at a Rudolf Steiner School and within that environment has instigated a diverse musical program. He directs a brass band, a wind octet and a chamber orchestra. The past few years has seen a natural progression to a wider public. He is leading and playing in the Vanir Recorder Ensemble.

Gary Monger

Gary Monger was born in Sydney in 1973 and studied composition at the University of Sydney with Anne Boyd, Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe. In 1996 he was the runner-up in the 2MBS FM young composers competition with the ensemble piece Red Rocks and Dolphins.

In order to make money and still have time to compose he, teaches in a school part-time, arranges musicals and band music for schools, teaches composition and piano privately and plays piano for musicals.

He likes a good Greek salad with anchovies (perhaps a somewhat idiosyncratic taste). He believes that creating music is a central part of who he is: something he has come to respect as important and worthwhile, regardless of the impression that our culture gives at any particular time.

Matthew Minter

Matthew Minter grew up on a rural property at Bathurst and didn’t commence his musical training until the relatively late age of 10. Through hard work Matthew made up for lost time and completed his AmusA on piano after only 6 years of lessons. Matthew was awarded the most senior music scholarship of the Mitchell Conservatorium at Bathurst.

Matthew moved to Sydney to continue his studies in piano and composition at the Institute of Music under Nikolai Sokolov, later transferring to the piano performance program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music studying under Phillip Shovk. Matthew graduated from the piano performance degree with the award of the best senior piano recital for the year.

Matthew has undertaken periods of study in Germany and Taiwan, however it is composition that has become his passion and major artistic focus in the recent years. Matthew commenced studying composition with Dan Walker in 2015 and has written extensively for choir, piano and chamber music. He has achieved considerable success in composition competitions including the silver medal in the Golden Key International Piano Composition Competition in 2016.

Matthew is a passionate teacher and has had a very successful teaching career. He has a particular interest in advanced composition education. From 2016 to 2021 he held the position of Director of Music at the Presbyterian Ladies College Armidale. Matthew is currently studying for his Masters of Music majoring in Composition with Robert Davidson at the University of Queensland.

Nicholas Ng

Nicholas Ng (b. 1979) writes both contemporary classical music and music for commercial purposes. In 2001, he graduated with first class honours in Composition from Sydney University. As a student, Nicholas composed for the United Nations of Australia, the Australian Youth Orchestra National Music Camp (2000 and 2002), and the Sydney Spring Festival's 'Young Composers Salon' (2000 and 2001). His achievements include the 'Young Composers Salon' Best Composition Prize, the Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize for Composition and the Sarah Theresa Makinson Prize for Composition. Nicholas has had two ABC-FM broadcasts and an American first performance of his 'By Crescent Moon and Magpie Song'. He is now working on an SBS documentary film score and hopes to study composition in France after completing his doctorate in Ethnomusicology at Sydney University.

Elisabeth Middleton

Elisabeth Middleton grew up in Taree and recalls a music camp at which she was politely but firmly replaced as an accompanist by Roger Woodward. She subsequently studied at the Sydney Conservatorium with Raymond Hanson, Noel Nickson and Winifred Burston.

After completing a DipEd at Sydney Teachers' College, she taught music in NSW and Victorian high schools. She has also played piano in restaurants, taught keyboard for Yamaha, recorder for community music classes and, most recently, in an alternative primary school. At present she is finding out what is involved in being a trad jazz pianist.

She has been a member of the Victorian Recorder Guild for some years and has played recorder in various groups, the most long-standing being Phoenix. She is married to Hugh and has three children.

Suzanne Palmer-Holton

Suzanne Palmer-Holton is a Melbourne based composer specialising in music for school choirs, recorder and flute.

Pete Peters

I am an only ‘child’ (Ha!) but many of my relatives are/were musical (no-one keeps in touch). My father played by ear in the key of F# except for one piece he was taught in E flat and his brother Chris made and played Hawaiian guitars in a band. My mother’s family also had a few musicians among them but we never kept in touch. I worked semi-pro on accordion from age 14 years changing to piano at about 18 years to the present and professionally for 20 years in most types of band, but have a leaning toward mainstream jazz.

I became a qualified music teacher in 1975. I specialise in teaching and playing piano and recorders, band vocals, group work, composition, theory and acting the fool. I dislike pompous academia and firmly believe that music is not on the page but from the heart and that it should be performed so.

My past includes a cruise around the world in 1964 as my first pro job; making a record with a very talented 8 piece band for whom I worked for about 4 years; doing a live broadcast for the BBC; and a BBC program called “Night Ride”; some years with Mecca ballrooms around the country; Summer seasons; Winter seasons; WMCs; Night club work backing world class artists; music festivals, with pupils having huge successes and presently I’m working with two local Big Bands in County Durham and doing a few odd gigs. Nearly all my works are songs for various instruments and can played by most with a little thought!

Malcolm Tattersall

Malcolm Tattersall (b. 1952) is a composer, recorder player and teacher currently living in Townsville. He has had a long term involvement with the recorder and its acoustics and repertoire, with a particular interest in Australian recorder music for which he compiled some of the first catalogues and lists. For a number of years he was the editor of The Recorder, the journal of the Victorian Recorder Guild.

Edward Southall

Born in Hereford in 1986, Edward is currently in his second year at Queens’ College, Cambridge where he is reading Social and Political Sciences. In 2006 Edward completed a year of studying with Mark-Anthony Turnage at London’s Royal College of Music. He has continued these lessons privately whilst at Cambridge.

Edward started composing in 2000, his first composition winning a prize in the European Piano Teachers’ Association Composition Competition. Since then he has been a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain Composers’ Course, where he was taught by Paul Patterson and Diana Burrel, a prizewinner in the BBC Proms/Guardian Young Composer Competition and has had works broadcast on BBC Radio Two, Three and World Service. Last year, Edward was winner of the Cambridge Young Composer of the Year Competition.

Ensembles that have performed Edward’s music include the Endymion Ensemble, The King’s Chamber Orchestra (under Gerard Le Feuvre), the National Youth Orchestra Sinfonietta, the Royal College of Music Sinfonietta, the Contemporary Consort and the Britten Sinfonia (under James MacMillan) at places such as London (the Purcell Room, the Warehouse, Steinway Hall and the British Council Building), Oxford, Cambridge, Jersey and New York City (The Juilliard School).

Edward is grateful to the Paul Brown Memorial Fund and the Strasser Jersey Foundation for their support.

Nathan Shirley

Nathan Shirley was born in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1981. He shares his birthday with the great master Sergei Prokofiev. At the age of 17 he began private lessons in composition with Olga Harris, an accomplished Russian composer and the last student of Aram Khachaturian. Beyond this, Mr. Shirley's musical education was largely self guided. Nathan Shirley studied piano and composition at several schools and conservatories until shortly after his 21st birthday when he broke with the academic music world for good. Later the same year his composition 'Music for Strings and Marimba'
was a winner in the 2002 Andrzej Panufnik International Composers' Competition in Poland. He has since gone on to win several other competitions both national and international, and has served as a judge. Nathan Shirley has been a guest lecturer on the history of Russian music, and has performed and conducted his work throughout the eastern US and eastern Europe. His music has been featured on radio in Europe, Canada, and the US. Mr. Shirley's influences are diverse, from Bach and Vivaldi, to Chopin and Schumann, to Stravinsky and Prokofiev and beyond. Non-classical influences include folk music from around the world, jazz, and experimental popular music. His own style is not nationalistic, but rather more broad and humanistic. Nathan Shirley has taught piano to over 60 students and has composed many pieces for children. He has written for film, animation, and other media, but composing for the concert hall is his true passion. He also began accepting commissions for new work in 2005, and has since written for musicians from all over the world. Nathan Shirley currently lives in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina with his wife and daughter.

Allye Sinclair

Allye Sinclair works as a performer, composer and teacher in Adelaide. She works as a cellist and has also been active as a composer, writing for a number of instrumental and vocal combinations including a musical for children. She currently plays and sings original music with Candlelight, Inkling and Sneak’s Noise, and teaches music at the Willunga Waldorf School.

Benjamin Thorn

Benjamin Thorn was born in Canberra and studied at the Canberra School of Music and the University of Sydney. He has a PhD in Theatre Semiotics and a DipEd. He is both a composer and a performer, mostly on the recorder. He currently lives in Armidale, NSW.

His compositional output includes a range of instrumental, vocal, choral and music theatre works. He has gained wide acclaim for his works for recorder. In 1986 Pipistrelli gialli was an official Australian submission to the World Music Days. He edited Recorders at Large, a two volume collection of mostly Australian recorder music published by Currency Press which has received considerable critical acclaim. The voice of the crocodile... has been published by Moeck Verlag and was a set work for the International Recorder Competition in Karlsruhe in 1992. In 1991 Missa Sine Verbum won the 2MBS FM Young Composers Award, and Two Diagonals and a Squiggle, the Fellowship of Australian Composers competition with The Voice of the Crocodile... being commended in the same competition.

He has edited a number of early 17th Century works for Saraband music, a volume of Larry Sitsky's piano music for children for Currency Press and is also involved in editing and producing Australian recorder music for Orpheus Music, who have published a number of his works. Other works have been published by Carus in Germany and Loux in the USA.

More about Benjamin Thorn

Andrew Uren

Andrew Uren (b. Melbourne, 1955) played guitar from the age of eight and went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music, London, and at Melbourne State College of Education. He became a fine guitarist, and developed an interesting individual voice as a composer with works centring on his own instrument but extending to an opera, a symphony and concertos for flute and for guitar. Because of his tragically early passing at the age of only 34 in 1989, however, most of his music remains unpublished and therefore virtually unknown.

Rodney Waterman

Rodney Waterman is a performer, teacher and composer. He studied recorder with Kees Boeke in Italy and Holland in the mid-1980s. His repertoire is eclectic, including early, folk, comtemporary music and Brazilian. He has a particular interest in improvised music. He has performed and tutored widely in Australia and New Zealand including numerous major Festivals. His popular CD Agua e Vinho with Australian guitarist Doug de Vries, featuring four of Rodney's original compositions, was released internationally in 2001 by ECM Records, Germany.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8WPIFyvNIE

Jessica Wells

Jessica Wells was born in Florida, USA in 1974 and migrated to Australia at the age of 11. She completed her Bachelor of Music degree in Composition at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1996 and graduated with first class honours. A University Postgraduate Award allowed Jessica to complete her Masters Degree at the Conservatorium under Dr Bozidar Kos, and since 1998 she has been teaching composition there part-time.

Jessica's orchestral music has been performed by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Sinfonia, QueenslandOrchestra and Sydney Conservatorium Symphony Orchestra. Her piece The Eight Immortals was the only Australian finalist in the prestigious Alexander Zemlinsky International Prize for orchestral composition in the USA. Jessica has received two Australia Council Grants in the last two years to write new compositions for solo harp and the Sydney Conservatorium Cello Ensemble, and was commissioned by Symphony Australia to write a work for the TSO in 2001 as part of the 'New Voices'program. Many of her works have been recorded and broadcast by theABC, and she was recently a semi-finalist in the Arts category of the Young Australian of the Year Awards for 2001.

Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh is a professional accompanist and piano teacher.Her music studies include DSCM at Newcastle Conservatorium, advanced piano performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Repetiteur studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In 1999 she moved to Sydney to repetiteur for the the new Australian opera “Madeline Lee” – by John Haddock. Subsequently she worked as a repetiteur for Opera Australia. Currently, she is working as a piano/theory teacher and accompanist for Trinity Grammar School in Summer Hill. Louise became interested in composing after Year 12 students sought her advice about their composition projects. This led her to studying composition with Matthew Hindson in 2007.Louise’s other musical interests include playing Japanese taiko drums.

Ryan Williams

Ryan Williams is a recorder player, improviser, interdisciplinary-performance maker & arts producer based in Naarm/Melbourne. His creative practice focuses on composing and improvising new music, and creating exploratory & transdisciplinary projects through skill-sharing collaborations with artists and communities. Ryan performs and creates within improvisatory & exploratory music, site-specific/installation contexts, traditional music from Eastern Europe, Japan, Ireland and the U.S, western art music & jazz, and popular folk music. His focus on exploratory & transdisciplinary performance has led to distinct creative projects that balance collaboration between artists from different disciplines, in a skill-sharing environment, to create outcomes in which artists develop a shared performance practice.

Ryan is currently a PhD candidate, where he is developing works that focus on the recorder in interdisciplinary performance. He co-directs a multitude of ensembles and through these projects has released over ten albums that cross numerous musical genres. He is the recipient of several international and national artistic grants, and has performed at major Australian and international festivals including Falls Festival, Setouchi Triennale, Peninsula Summer Music Festival, Antwerp Fringe Festival, Woodford Folk Festival, Four Winds Festival & Tilde New Music Festival. He regularly performs with leading arts companies from around Australia, including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, ELISION Ensemble & Snuff Puppets, teaches at the New Music Studio, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and co-directs the Melbourne Recorder Academy. He has a strong connection to Japan through regular artistic collaborations with communities and musicians, and he continues to develop new cultural links between Australia and Japan through leading international projects and artistic curation. Ryan is committed to creating artistic opportunities for outsiders in his field, and continues to achieve this through curating & producing arts projects, commissioning artists, collaborating with communities, and teaching.

Ade Vincent

Ade Vincent is a prolific composer and songwriter with a diverse body of work. His concert music includes four commissioned works for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and pieces for Tinalley String Quartet featuring Lior. He is lead singer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter for indie-pop quartet The Tiger & Me, who are signed to ABC Music. His debut solo album was released in 2015 – an art/pop song-cycle setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.

Vincent began his career as a recorder player, studying with Helen Fairhall and Ruth Wilkinson and gaining his L.Mus.A before moving into composition.

He is published by Gaga Music and The Australian Music Centre. He is currently completing a PhD in Music (Composition) at the University of Melbourne, and he lectures in composition at Box Hill Institute.

Tom Zadik

Tom Zadik has been concentrating on composition since retiring from clinical psychology. He was lucky enough to make contact with Anthony Gilbert, retired Head of Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, who has given him valuable support and advice. He is married and lives in Nottingham, UK.