Timothy Constable

Timothy Constable is an award-winning percussionist and composer. He is a member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. A compelling, creative and sensitive performer, he has performed as concerto and chamber music soloist at the majority of Australian classical music festivals, in New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, UK, Ireland, Senegal, USA, China, Korea, Nepal and South-East Asia. He was the artistic director of Synergy Percussion between 2009 and 2017, during which time the group undertook some of its most ambitious work, including the 40th anniversary season in 2014, and extensive collaboration with renowned ensemble Noreum Machi (S. Korea), commissions of Steve Reich, Anthony Pateras, several recordings and the video project 40under40. Recent works include Omer Backley-Astrachan (Maholohet Festival, Israel), Orava String Quartet (Australian Festival of Chamber Music), Cinemusica (Australian Chamber Orchestra), Ordinary Time and Spirals (Southern Cross Soloists), and numerously for Noreum Machi, Synergy Percussion and Taikoz. Contemporary dance score credits include Meryl Tankard, Shaun Parker, Legs on the Wall and Dance Makers Collective. He is committed to both new and ancient music, with a large body of World/Australasian premieres to his name, including Steve Reich Mallet Quartet, György Ligeti Síppal, Dobbal, Nádihegedüvel, Anthony Pateras Beauty Will Be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All, and Flesh and Ghost, works by Simon Holt, Lisa Lim, Arvo Pärt, Gerard Brophy among many others. In the realm of ancient music, he has undertaken detailed study with Senegalese master drummer Aly N’Dyiaye Rose, and (currently) Korean Jangoo with Kim Yeong-Taek and Kim Chong-Hee. He is a Freedman music fellow, an Elizabethan Theatre Trust scholar, a university medalist of Newcastle University, and a graduate of Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Sweden.

Dayho Loyd

I’m a composer who is interested in using generative systems to create music. I use MaxMSP as my primary compositional environment, sometimes incorporating a theremin. My interests include noise, idm (terrible name), and free improvisation.

Lamorna Nightingale

Lamorna Nightingale is a freelance flautist, concert presenter, educator and publisher who is passionate about the future of art music in Australia. Lamorna has many years experience working in the orchestral sector, performing regularly with the ACO, SSO and AOBO. She is a core member of the new music group, Ensemble Offspring, a group with a strong commitment to the nurturing of Australian composers. Recent highlights performing with Ensemble Offspring include Classical:NEXT Festival Rotterdam 2019, Solitude European Tour 2019, World Premier performance of Fantasie for solo flute by Elisabeth Younan at Lone Hemispheres 2019. Since 2017 Lamorna has curated and produced a new concert series Sydney ‘BackStage Music’. This series was initiated to create a community that supports, encourages and fosters a culture for living music. From 2017-19 BackStage have presented 10 programs which showcase early career and established local and international artists in back to back sets of living music. Lamorna has created several recordings of new Australian flute music with repertoire selected to suit flute players with less experience with new music. This music is now widely performed by students and professionals Australia wide and internationally, transforming for many flute players their experience of new Australian music. She has recently created a new album of Australian music for flute and electronics with an associated education kit designed to introduce school students to electroacoustic music and contemporary Australian classical composition. Lamorna has also created several pedagogical volumes of repertoire for young flute players through her publishing company ‘Fluteworthy’.

James Nightingale

James Nightingale is a saxophonist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the alto saxophonist with the saxophone quartet Continuum Sax and has performed regularly as a casual musician with Sydney’s orchestras since 1993. He performs as a soloist and chamber musician, including recent appearances for Backstage Music, the Melbourne International Saxophone Festival (2019) and for the Canberra International Music Festival (with Ensemble Offspring, Continuum Sax and as a casual musician). His recordings of saxophone music by Alan Holley and Andrew Ford have been released on CD. Performances with Continuum Sax for Phoenix Central Park are now available on YouTube. James has been a leading exponent of new Australian music for saxophone, commissioning new works and giving premiere performances, both as a soloist and with Continuum Sax. Between 2007 and 2015, James was the President of the New Music Network. James studied saxophone at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music between 1989 and 1992, graduating as the first saxophonist to earn the Bachelor of Music degree from The University of Sydney and as Student of the Year. From 1997, James began a Masters Degree in Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, completing a thesis on Paul Mefano’s work for solo tenor saxophone, Periple. After completing this degree he then began a PhD at the University of Queensland in the field of Cultural Policy Studies, completing his doctorate in 2011.

Liam Mulligan (Festival Curator)

Liam Mulligan (b. 1997) is a composer, vocalist, film maker and visual artist based in the Sutherland Shire. Liam's music is heavily inspired by experimental electronic noise with strong aleatoric elements. His pieces focus on creating a strong bond between the performers and audience through multi-sensory composition and performance. His practices in music define who he is as a film maker and visual artist. These works focus on the abstraction of everyday life, and are created and edited through particular software which allows him to improvise freely. Liam also enjoys combining his musical and artistic practices into installations and performances which revolve around input from the audience. Liam's musical works have been premiered in Verbrugghen Hall, City Recital Hall, St Stephen's Uniting Church and in The Rocks for events including Vivid Sydney and Unashamedly Original. He is also a co-founder of the Sydney based composer/performer collective Konzertprojekt where, in 2019, Liam co-curated and project managed 'Konzertprojekt presents: Light Qualities' - a mini-festival of four concerts featuring new Australian music from emerging composers.

Benjamin Carey

Benjamin Carey is a Sydney-based composer, improviser and academic. He makes electronic music using the modular synthesiser, develops interactive music software and creates audio-visual works. Ben’s research and practice is concerned with musical interactivity, generativity and the delicate dance between human and machine agencies in composition and performance. Ben has released four albums; ANTIMATTER (2019, Hospital Hill Records), derivations | human-machine improvisations (2014, self-released), Ben + Zamyatin (2013, Not-Applicable Records), and Wingello Sessions, (2014, self-released). His work has been performed and exhibited nationally and internationally at numerous festivals and conferences including the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (UK), the dBâle festival of electronic music (Switzerland), the New York City Electronic Music Festival (USA), the Totally Huge New Music Festival (Australia), IRCAM Live @ La Gaité Lyrique (France), the Festival de Mùsica Electroacùstica (Chile), the International Computer Music Conference (Australia) and the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (USA, UK and Australia). Ben collaborates regularly with artists/ensembles such as Sonya Holowell, Zubin Kanga, Joshua Hyde, Jane Sheldon, Ollie Bown, Alon Ilsar, Ensemble Offspring, Sydney Chamber Opera, and many others. Ben completed a PhD in interactive musical composition at the University of Technology Sydney in 2016, and is currently Lecturer in Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Connor Malanos

Connor Malanos is a B.Mus (Music-Ed) graduate from the Sydney Con with a background in classical viola, and a foreground in making weird sounds with his mouth. He has toured all over Australia and New Zealand delivering Beatboxing programs for students and workshops for teacher Professional Development, as well as filming his documentary on the topic. Connor has been extremely fortunate to spend time performing and working with some of Australia's best musicians across a wide range of genres including Jazz, Hip-Hop, Rap, Folk, Electronic, A Cappella, Connor is a strong advocate of 'the whole musician' and rounded development across a broad range of skills through Project Based Learning.

Adam Melzer

Adam Melzer is an English born, Australian-based composer. His compositional work is varied, but more recently has focus in on both acousmatic and experimental music domains. He has recently graduated from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with the result of a First Class Bachelor of Composition (Honours). In addition, he has previously been a featured artist in the November 2019 playlist "Evolving Waves", curated by Making Waves New Music. Adam is also a multi-instrumentalist. He holds a High Distinction (A+) AMEB Certificate of Performance in Piano, a Credit (B+) in AMEB 8th Grade Trombone, and has participated in Australian Youth Orchestra Young Symphonists Camps playing 1st and 3rd trombone (2013 - 2015). Furthermore, Adam is a passionate piano teacher, currently working for Archadenia Music 2018 – present). He has also done volunteer work for the Australian Children's Music Foundation (2014), and has previously stage managed the Jazz Stars of the Future Stage at the Manly Jazz Festival (2016 – 2017).

Jaslyn Robertson

Jaslyn Robertson is a young Melbourne-based composer navigating a developing career in music with her interests in social justice. An excitement for unusual sounds, alternate tuning systems and new forms of notation draws her to unique instruments including theremin, quartertone flugelhorn and analogue synths. At Monash University she studied with David Chisholm and Thomas Reiner, and was awarded the prize for best Honours in Music for her composition folio and research on alternate gazes in the music of gender oppressed people. She has composed for world-class performers including Tristram Williams, the Argonaut String Quartet, Landesjugendensemble Neue Musik Berlin and Sydney’s ‘the music box project’. Her work has received multiple performances in Germany, including at the Deutsche Oper as part of Klangwerkstatt Festival für Neue Musik Berlin, as well as in Canada in Toronto Creative Music Lab. Locally, she has had multiple works performed at the Bendigo International Festival for Exploratory Music and Tilde New Music Festival. She has recently been awarded the Monash Animated Notation Ensemble commissioning prize, to create an animated score in 2020 for a high profile performance by an ensemble of staff and postgraduate students. She is a regular participant of the Little Songs of the Mutilated collaborative composition project, often appears on Making Waves playlists and recently collaborated on an audio/visual work for the Lifted Brow with artist/poet Eloise Grills. Her work Wandering for quartertone flugelhorn was awarded the 2015 Monash University Composition Prize. Jaslyn is also a passionate advocate of diversity in the arts and has presented workshops, papers and seminars on this topic at BIFEM, Melbourne Music Analysis Summer School, the Women in Creative Arts conference at ANU and on the radio program Eclectica 3MDR. She started the Queer and Now interview series in CutCommon Magazine.

Jodie Kell

Jodie Kell is a musician, composer and musicologist who works at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the PARADISEC digital archive. As part of her work, she produces the podcast Toksave: Culture Talks, a series of interviews with people who have personal and cultural connections with the archive. Jodie is currently completing a PhD in ethnomusicology, her research focusing on how gender is enacted in the culture of musical practice and performance. Jodie works closely with musicians from Maningrida, an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory, including the ground breaking all women’s Ripple Effect Band, in which she plays lead guitar. Through collaboration with Ndjébbana, Kune, Na-kara and Burarra people, she explores the expression of place through sound and image. As the first women from their community to take up instruments and form a band, the women from Ripple Effect are making waves not only in Arnhem Land but nationally as they share their culture through the medium of contemporary music. In January 2020, the band was invited by Brian Ritchie to perform at Mona Foma, their performance incorporating the visual collage njárra-djorrka wíba, filmed on country throughout 2019. Jodie’s compositional work explores narrative themes through montage. In 2015, teaming up with Amnesty International, she created The Endless Journey shown at the Art Bender Festival in Newcastle NSW, a multi-disciplinary construction of a dark sad tale that aimed to provoke discussion about Australia’s treatment of children seeking asylum Australia. In 2017, she worked with artists Bob Burruwul and Lena Yarinkura to present Namorroddo at the Gallery of South Australia, an immersive artwork recreating the malevolent spirits who live in the Kune country. In 2019 her piece Jarracharra was launched at the Australian Embassy in Paris in a collaboration with the Bábbarra Women’s Centre of Maningrida and is booked to tour galleries throughout Europe once isolation measures are eased.

Elizabeth Jigalin (Festival Curator)

Elizabeth is a composer. Her friends recently described her music making as ‘beautiful, organised chaos’ and an ‘awesome sandpit’ that she likes to invites others along to play in, explore and sometimes get a little messy in. You’ll often find Elizabeth composing for a range of musicians and instrumental forces (from music for a field of theremins…to string trios…to red objects), performing and composing new soundtracks for silent films on the piano (frequently in collaboration with violinist Jane Aubourg), making music outside the usual order of things with "the music box project" and with guitarist Danica Hobden as "dnka+zil".

Anthony Pasquill

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Listed by Limelight magazine as a Rising Star in Australia’s choral scene, Anthony has worked with some of today's leading conductors, preparing choirs across the UK and Australia. He currently works as Musical Director of Bel a cappella (Sydney) as well as the accompanist at Wenona School and Monte Sant' Angelo (Sydney) having worked as Assistant Chorus Master of the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and the Associate Chorus Master of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus

Sian

Sian Lindsay is a Sydney based composer. She grew up playing clarinet and developed a keen interest in composing electroacoustic music, writing for small chamber groups with electronics. While completing her Bachelor degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of music, Sian was drawn to the modular synthesiser and has since started improvising and exploring the sound world of analog synths.

Ciaran Frame

Ciaran Frame is a composer and educator based in Melbourne. Having completed his Honours degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Ciaran is passionate about cross-disciplinary collaboration and education, working at the intersection of data, technology and music. His work has been featured and premiered around Australia and internationally, with recent projects including a regional pilot program of synthesiser workshops for young children, as well as making music out of lichen in the Arctic Circle.

Amanda Cole

Amanda Cole is a composer of instrumental and electronic New Music. Her compositions feature microtonal structures, interference beats and fusions of electronic and acoustic timbres. Amanda’s compositions include percussion trios for a purpose built Microtonal Glass Harmonica, a string quartet for string harmonics and sine tones and an audio-visual installation that maps pitch to hue. Amanda’s compositions have been performed by Synergy Percussion, Ensemble Offspring, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus, The Noise String Quartet and Kroumata (Sweden). Her music has been performed at the Sydney Opera House, Art Gallery of NSW, Museum of Contemporary Art, Casula Powerhouse and Salamanca Arts Centre. Her piece Barcelona Bells for carillon and sine tones was recently premiered in Barcelona at the Palau de la Generalitat by Grace Chan. In 2016 Amanda collaborated with visual artist Micheala Gleave and programmer Warren Armstrong to create A Galaxy of Suns, which is a smart phone app and associated choral performance that ‘plays’ the stars as they rise and set over 360˚ of the horizon – for any location on Earth. The choral version of this piece has been performed at Dark Mofo (2016), Bristol Biennial (2016), Melbourne Festival (2017) and the Horizon Festival (2019). In 2013 Amanda was awarded an Australia Council Creative Arts Fellowship. In 2019 she was awarded the Apra Professional Development Award in the Art Music category. Amanda has a Bachelor of Music (Hons.1) and a PhD in Composition from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Zubin Kanga

Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, improviser and technologist. Over the last decade he has established his reputation in Europe and Australia as a leading innovator of new approaches to the piano. His work in recent years has focused on new models of interaction between a live musician and new technologies, using film, AI, motion capture, 3D modelling, animation and virtual reality. Zubin has performed at many international festivals and international venues including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival, Sydney Festival (Australia), Festival Presénces (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Darmstadt, Podium Festival (Germany), Resonator Festival (Sweden), Gaudeamus Festival, November Music (Netherlands), CUBE, Graz (Austria) and Borealis Festival (Norway). He has performed several concerti under the composer’s baton, including with Thomas Adès and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and with Beat Furrer and the London Sinfonietta. He is a member of Ensemble Offspring and has performed duos with Brett Dean, Rolf Hind, Thomas Adés and Jack Liebeck. Zubin has collaborated with many of the world’s leading composers including Michael Finnissy, George Benjamin, Nicole Lizée, Steve Reich, and Liza Lim and premiered more than 120 new works. His collaboration with Alexander Schubert on WIKI-PIANO.NET is being performed in a 25 city international tour and has been covered by The Times (UK), WDR (Germany National Radio), Limelight Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, German national television, BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service. As a composer, his solo piano works have been performed at the Waterloo, Bangor and Cambridge Music Festivals and broadcast on the BBC and ABC. His work, Dead Leaves, was selected to represent Australia at the 2018 International Rostrum of Composers and his viola-piano duo, Spider Web Castle, was premiered with Brett Dean at City Recital Hall, Sydney. A Masters and PhD graduate of the Royal Academy of Music, London, Zubin was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Nice and IRCAM, Paris before becoming a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Jonathan Watson

A human pursuing experimental sound that assists in the human story.

Anna McMIchael

Anna McMichael is an Australian-born violinist who has returned to live in Australia in 2010 after 17 years in Europe performing in many of the major ensembles and orchestras. In Australia, she has been first prize winner of the String final of the ABC Instrumental and Vocal Competition, guest assistant leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, guest associate concertmaster of Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and guest concertmaster of Orchestra Victoria. Anna is Co-ordinator of Strings at the Sir Zelman Cowan School of Music, Monash University. Anna has performed at many European music festivals with a number of Dutch chamber ensembles and toured extensively with groups such as the London Sinfonietta, Amsterdam Sinfonietta Chamber Orchestra, Nieuw Ensemble, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. She has recorded for a number of European recording labels and been active teaching masterclasses and workshops in conservatoriums in both Europe and Australia. Anna performs throughout Australia and was Co-Director of the Tyalgum Music Festival for 6 years and is a core member of the early music group, Ironwood.

Hi. My name is Kun Ho Lim AKA Limited Days. I've been into producing future bass, experimental pop songs. My ultimate goal with my music career is to express my identity. I was born in Korea (south), then moved to Vietnam and graduated my high school and came to Australia. With all these cultures that I have experienced. I was searching for a method to express my self. In my case. It was music.

Emma Harlock

Emma Harlock is a Western Sydney based composer and performer. She completed a Master of Research at Western Sydney University, with the supervision of Associate Professor Bruce Crossman and Dr Clare Maclean, where her research focussed on exploring the cross-cultural connections between American minimalism and French spectralism. Her works, both scored and performative, focus on the exploration of evolving timbre and textures. Emma enjoys performing in her quasi-improvisational ambient duo Sonfa with Simon Gooden, a duo comprised of piano, bass guitar, and electronics. Her notated compositions sit somewhere between the minimalist, contemporary classical, and spectral genres.