Danaë Killian

A passionate champion of modern art music, Danaë Killian typically performs dozens of contemporary compositions each year, from Australia and abroad, many of them premieres.

Having played throughout Europe, China, the USA, Australia and New Zealand, she has chosen to unfold her practice close to home in Naarm/Melbourne while addressing the challenges of chronic illness and concomitant disability. She is a core artist with Forest Collective, a transdisciplinary new-music band under the artistic direction of Evan J Lawson, and she also performs widely as freelance soloist and collaborator. From 2014 to 2023 she was an Honorary Fellow in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne; as a State Examiner with the Australian Music Examinations Board she engages with music education in the wider community.

Killian earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2010. Her thesis on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a contemporary reimagining of the harmony of the spheres received her Faculty’s nomination for the University’s Chancellor’s Prize. She earlier completed BA(Mus) and MMus degrees at the Victorian College of the Arts, after secondary study at the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School. Awards have included the Fulbright (W. G. Walker) Postgraduate Scholarship for independent study in the USA, an Australia Award Endeavour Postdoctoral Research Fellowship undertaken in China, the Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarship, an Australian Postgraduate Award, a Melbourne Abroad Travelling Scholarship, the Keith E. Chapman Scholarship, the Faye Marles Postgraduate Scholarship, the John Gaitskell Memorial Mensa Prize, the Norman Barton Piano Concerto Scholarship, the Gwen Nisbet Prize, the Elsie Dickinson Prize, and grants from the Alexander Stiftung and the Ileen McPherson Trust.

Nearest to her artistic heart is the creating of novel relationships between music and poetry in expressionist performance. Her research project Transformations and Initiations: Sylvia Plath in Flames, in Performance produced three major works between 2012 and 2015—Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime, The Dove’s Annihilation, and The Flame and the Rose Folded Together—exploring poetic and musical sound-chemistry, biographical and artistic confession, and the structures of potential and actual selves. Those themes continue in My Heart (2017, rev. 2024), a performance of soul-homelessness and starry yearning that seeks the lost expressionist Berlin of 1911 within the creative hearts of composer-friends in her home city, includes a tarot reading, and merges her voice with the poetry of Holocaust survivor Else Lasker-Schüler. Her recorded My Heart with Move Records was set for release in January 2026; a recording of the complete piano solo music of Melbourne composer Eve Duncan, with whom she treasures a long association, is also in the making. Earlier Move discs include the critically acclaimed Arnold Schoenberg: Complete Works for Piano Solo (Move, 2014) and, with Barbara Hornung, Ernest Bloch: Viola and Piano (Move, 2018).

Much of her research identity has been forged through contemplative engagement with Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophie (anthroposophy). Connecting existential, idealist and mystical streams, she employs it as a pathway for phenomenologically investigating musical and poetic processes. The essay-booklet For Grasping Schoenberg: An Epistemology of Sense and Meaning in Word, Music, and the Moving of a Pianist’s Arms (Melbourne: Move, 2015) braids Steiner’s and Schoenberg’s thinking—they were contemporary Austrians—with her own pianistic line of 21st-century expressionist enquiry. She has published on Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, and presented on Woolf, Plath, Steiner and Schoenberg at national and international conferences. Residencies at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, University of Southern California, and the Poetry Center, Smith College, allowed joyous work with original drafts and other tactile archive materials. That expertise has informed graduate supervision and examination, and peer review for PMLA and Steiner Education Australia.

Semi-emergent from extended hospitalisations for anorexia nervosa and complex PTSD, she has been searching for a newly, fierily articulate way to explore the impact of biographical trauma on selfhood and psychical growth, beyond silencing limits inscribed by captor-perpetrator power—a way to speak that does not name names and expose her to danger in the real world. The task looks as hopelessly impossible as it is necessary. Music offers truth without words; she wants the words too. Words from imaginal exposure therapy sessions recorded by Phoenix Australia in 2020 seed a new concert-length solo piano and spoken-word composition-performance. At periphery and centre of the struggle for a free and fearless voice is reclaiming, in art as in life, the feminist and lesbian identity assaulted and subdued—“corrected”—when it emerged in youth. The nascent work Weightless yokes lived experience as rape survivor and psychiatric patient to the vast therapeutic resources, and risks, alive within music and language.

Artist's website: vca-mcm.unimelb.edu.au