Ron Nagorcka

Composer, performer and naturalist Ron Nagorcka (born 1948) spent his childhood exploring music and the natural world on a sheep farm in Western Victoria. He studied at Melbourne University with Keith Humble and Ian Bonighton, and at the University of California San Diego.

During the 1970s he was active as a composer in Melbourne, with a prominent role in avant-garde musical life, and taught at the Melbourne State College. He has toured Europe, the USA and Japan on various occasions.

In 1988 he moved to a remote forest in northern Tasmania, where he built his own house and solar-powered studio. A lasting concern with Australian bush sound – especially birds – with electronics, and with just intonation runs through his work. Field recordings from Tasmania and the arid zones of mainland Australia underpin many of his compositions. He also makes and plays his own didjeridus, an instrument that has shaped his approach to composition from the start of his career.

From 1990 to 1996 his music was performed mostly by the ensemble NYET, a group of artists closely interested in their relationship to the Tasmanian environment.

In October 1997 he was joined by Robert Williams and Larry Polansky in a concert for the “Sounding Sphere” festival in Harima, Japan; the music prepared for that concert forms the basis of Devils of the Night (MD 3259).

In October 1998 his Tasmanian Toccata for didjeridu, sampler and pipe organ was the main feature of three concerts opening the new organ in the chapel of Trinity College in Melbourne.

In 1999 he received a commendation from Melbourne University in the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award. In August–September 1999 he undertook a “Wilderness Residency” at Eddystone Point, where he wrote This Beauteous Wicked Place, premiered in Ballarat in January 2000 and presented in the Great Hall of the Old Bailey by Nagorcka and Elizabeth Anderson as part of the 2001 London Festival.