Ensemble Density

Charles MacInnes was appointed to the position of principal bass trombone with the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra in Sydney at the age of nineteen. Four years later he moved to Germany to further his studies with Prof. Joachim Mittelacher at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater. After working for two seasons as Praktikant with the Hamburg Staatsoper, for the following eight years he was a frequent guest with the North German Radio (NDR) Big Band. Since returning to Australia in 2000, he has performed with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Australian Art Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Deep Purple and has appeared at many major international arts festivals. Charles has lectured at the Victorian College of the Arts, Monash University, Australian National University and The University of Melbourne (including two years as Head of Brass). He has a Masters in Composition and in 2018 completed a PhD researching improvisation in new music. His compositions have been played by the Australian Brass Quintet, Sarah Curro, Syzygy Ensemble, Melbourne Chamber Choir, Bennetts Lane Big Band, Nunique Quartet and the Monash Art Ensemble. He has had music reviews published in Realtime Arts and has presented hundreds of creative music workshops for people of all ages in Australia and Europe.

Michael Kieran Harvey studied with Alan Jenkins, Gordon Watson, and at the Liszt Academy under Sándor Falvai. His career has been notable for its diversity and wide repertoire. He has especially promoted the works of Australian and contemporary composers and recorded over 40 solo CDs on various labels. He has premiered many Australian and international concertos with all Australian symphony orchestras. Harvey's compositions have been performed in Europe, the UK, North and South America and Asia, in addition to major Australian festivals. He concentrates on non-standard formats, often humorously questioning classical music and embracing diverse influences. As a pianist Harvey's awards include the Grand Prix in the Pogorelich Piano Competition, USA (in 1993, the world's richest), the Debussy Medal (Paris 1986), the Centenary Medal (2002), the 2009 APRA award for Distinguished Services to Australian Music, and an AMC award (2014) for best classical performance (Elliott Gyger’s Inferno). Harvey gave the 2012 Peggy Glanville-Hicks address on the state of Australian music to acclaim and controversy. The Michael Kieran Harvey Scholarship was established in 2006 to encourage future directions in Australian keyboard art music.

Peter Neville is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts and was appointed Head of Percussion there (now the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music) in 2000. Since 2013 he has also been the inaugural Head of Percussion at the Australian National Academy of Music. While he works across a range of musical styles, he has a particular commitment to new music and chamber music, both of which he fosters in his role as Head of the Melbourne Conservatorium’s New Music Studio. As a founding member and percussionist with the ELISION Ensemble for 30 years, Peter has been involved with the majority of their concerts, recordings and international tours. A number of works, including Chris Dench's Driftglass, for percussion and ensemble, and Richard Barrett's Abglanzbeladen/Auseinandergeschrieben have been premiered by him and written with his unique set of virtuosic skills in mind. Peter contributes to other new music organisations including the Melbourne Composers’ League, Six Degrees Ensemble, Bolt Ensemble, Arcko Symphonic Project and the Nick Tsiavos ensemble, and has performed with numerous other contemporary organisations, including Chamber Made Opera, Speak Percussion, Syzygy, and is a regular performer at the Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music.

Possessing an interest in music of all genres and origins, Steve Falk embraces the process of creating new works with artists of varied disciplines and traditions. In addition to his work with contemporary classical music ensembles such as Speak Percussion, Chamber Made Opera and the Bolt Ensemble, he performs often with leading contemporary improvisers both within Australia and in Japan. Steve studied at the Victorian College of the Arts, Queensland Conservatorium of Music and later with the assistance of the The Seed Fund, at Toho Gakuen College of Music (Tokyo) where he studied marimba with the renowned soloist and composer Keiko Abe. Steve has played percussion with the Melbourne, Queensland and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestras, Orchestra Victoria and Orchestra Ensemble Kanazawa (Japan). As musical director of the popular Australian dance show Tap Dogs, he toured New Zealand, Japan, China, Korea and India. In 2013, Steve completed a new work for solo marimba entitled A Long Way Home and was commissioned by Museum Victoria to write for the Federation Bells. Steve is based in Melbourne and work as a sessional percussion teacher at The University of Melbourne and Monash University.

Tristram Williams maintains a busy international career as a soloist, ensemble musician, improviser and educator, and has been a member of ELISION since 2003. He has appeared as a soloist in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Britain, Ireland, the United States and China and many times around Australia, with Orchestra Victoria, and the Melbourne, Queensland and West Australian Symphony Orchestras. Tristram was Associate Principal Trumpet of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the age of 21. He has performed as acting Principal Trumpet with most of the Australian orchestras, and with several orchestras and ensembles in Europe, including MusikFabrik and the Gürzenich Orchester, Cologne. As a member of ELISION, he has given concerts of the newest and most virtuosic music, in cities such as Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Paris, Leuven, London, Boston and San Francisco. He has made several significant CD recordings, including the ELISION’s acclaimed brass CD Strange Forces. Tristram Williams is on the faculties of the Australian National Academy of Music and Monash University. His teachers have included Armando Ghitalla, Håkan Hardenberger, Reinhold Friedrich, Markus Stockhausen, Daniel Mendelow and John Kellaway. He is a laureate of major international trumpet competitions in Brussels and Eindhoven, an ABC Young Performers’ Award and a 2008 Churchill Fellowship, and was awarded a prize from Karlheinz Stockhausen at the 2006 Stockhausen Interpreters’ Course.

Australian musician Jeremy Alsop is a composer, producer and bass player of broad ranging versatility who has made a substantial contribution to Australian classical, jazz, rock, pop, folk and experimental music for over thirty years. He has had original works recorded by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chad Wackerman, Slava Grigoryan, David Hirschfelder, Paul Grabowsky, Mary Doumany, The Australian Concert Trio, Graeme Lyall and Colin Hay. As an electric bassist he has been featured on recordings with Michael and Randy Brecker, Joe Chindamo, Men at Work, John Sebastian, Don McLean, The World Rhythm Band, John Farnham, Robbie Dupree, Tim Finn, Olivia Newton-John as well as on hundreds of TV shows, advertising and film soundtracks. Jeremy has toured extensively throughout the USA, Europe, Japan and Asia including in performances at The Kennedy Centre in Washington, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Shanghai Music Festival, Live Aid 1985, The UK Chillout Festival and The Paris Music Festival. He has performed with Nigel Kennedy, Don Burrows, Juliet Prowse, Charles Aznavour, James Morrison, Thelma Housden, Bob Geldof, Tom Jones, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Synergy Percussion, The David Chesworth Ensemble, the Brodsky String Quartet and The Australian Ballet.

Tony Hicks has performed across Australia and internationally since the late 1970s. He maintains a prolific creative improvisation practice and works in jazz groups, function bands, TV and recording studios, theatre orchestras, big bands and productions by small arts organisations. As a creative improviser he collaborates with a range of artists including Carlo Carnevali, Dan Sheehan‘s Infinite Ape Trio, and Reassemble with Ren Walters and Phil Collings. Past projects include collaborations with electro-acoustic sound artists including David Tolley and the Bent Leather Band. Since 2000 he has performed in a number of Australian Art Orchestra projects including Crossing Roper Bar — an acclaimed collaboration with Indigenous Wagilak songmen from Ngukurr, Arnhem Land. He is also regularly invited to participate in the Monash Art Ensemble, collaborating with various international composers and performers. In 2012 he completed a practice-based performance Masters degree that focused on free improvisation processes and the development of improvisational facility with microtonality, tone-rows and extended techniques on woodwind instruments. He was a student of Australian saxophone virtuoso Peter Clinch, a member of the Peter Clinch Saxophone Quartet from 1977 to 1988, and in 1984 reached the national finals of the ABC Instrumental and Vocal Competition. He collaborates regularly with Gillian Howell to deliver creative music and composition projects for children in urban and regional settings.

Helen Bower is a versatile violinist who performs with artists from many different musical genres. She graduated with a First Class Honours Degree from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London and upon graduation was awarded the Vivian Prindl Outreach Prize for her music/dance collaboration In the Loop. She has since collaborated with artists as wide-reaching as poets, film-makers, actors, DJs and graffiti artists. As a classical violinist, she has worked with conductors Sir Charles Mackerras, Diego Masson, Miles Golding and Edward Gardner. Helen currently plays with Melbourne pianist Sam Colcheedas, in a duo that explores both newly composed music, as well as the traditional chamber music repertoire. Helen has also enjoyed working as a violinist and backing vocalist numerous bands in the UK and Australia, writing and playing for recordings, live shows and festival performances. She has recorded at Abbey Road Studios for Children In Need and 1916 The Musical. Since relocating to Melbourne, Australia, Helen has spent her time developing new and original work for solo violin and live electronic looping under the project title The Looping Glass. In 2014/2015 her show Through the Looping Glass [TTLG] was performed in Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth and was nominated for the music award at Perth Fringe World Festival. Continuing her exploration of the use of live looping in a contemporary classical music context, Helen worked with Melbourne composer Charles MacInnes to transform TTLG into Lost in the Looping Glass which premiered at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival, toured to Perth and New Zealand in early 2016, and was performed at White Night Melbourne in 2017 before heading to England for its first UK performances.

Nikki Edgar is a cellist and composer who specialises in improvisation in a contemporary classical music context. Nikki has studied cello performance at Monash University with Josephine Vains, and explored new readings of mainstream solo repertoire. As a member of the Monash Art Ensemble directed by Paul Grabowsky, she performed in 2016 with jazz trumpet soloist Thomasz Stańko at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne and again in 2017 for the Stonnington Jazz festival. Nikki has performed her own works at Deakin Edge, the Melbourne Recital Centre and Melba Hall at The University of Melbourne. As an outcome from a composition workshop she took part in directed by Lizzy Welsh, Ben Opie and Melissa Doecke at BIFEM, she was commissioned to write a work for Inventi Ensemble, and has had a composition workshopped and performed by the Australian String Quartet. In 2017 she won the Monash University Composition Prize for a solo violin work written for Erkki Veltheim. She was a participant in the 2016 Tilde New Music and Sound Art Academy and Festival, performed in the 2016 Future Creatives Music Festival at Second Story in Collingwood, and in May 2017 she premiered A Storm, A City for solo cello and electronics composed by Lewis Ingham. In August 2018 she was guest artistic director of Forest Collective and curated the Skin Deep performance at the Abbotsford Convert.