Australian composers

Ros Bandt
Ros Bandt is an Australian composer, performer and sound artist whose work joins ancient instruments, environmental sound and live electronics in spatial music, installation and sound sculpture.

Brenton Broadstock
Brenton Broadstock is one of Australia’s most established, respected and successful mid-generation composers. Over several decades he has built a substantial, varied catalogue distinguished by expressive range, structural assurance and strong engagement with performers and audiences, nationally and internationally.

Barry Conyngham
Barry Conyngham, born in Sydney, has received numerous awards and fellowships for composition, among them Churchill, Harkness, Australia Council and Senior Fulbright grants. He holds an ARIA, two Sounds Australian Critics Awards and two Maggs Awards.

George Dreyfus
One of Australia's best-known composers, especially for the theme from the television series Rush, George Dreyfus was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany at Victorian Parliament House for services to music.

Eve Duncan
Eve Duncan has composed chamber, orchestral and vocal music, with performances at festivals throughout Australia, Asia and Europe. Her catalogue ranges from intimate solo and ensemble pieces to larger vocal and orchestral scores.

Helen Gifford
Helen Gifford OAM is an Australian composer whose music often draws on Balinese and Javanese elements. She writes for stage, orchestra, chamber ensemble and solo instruments.

Tony Gould
Pianist and composer Tony Gould is one of Australia’s most respected musicians. His career has spanned jazz and other improvisatory forms as well as traditional and contemporary classical, and for decades he has stood at the forefront of music education in Australia.

Percy Grainger
Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist. A brilliant folk-song collector and arranger, he was also a restless experimenter whose work ranged from tuneful percussion to Free Music machines that foreshadowed electronic synthesis.

Michael Kieran Harvey
Australian pianist and composer Dr Michael Kieran Harvey FAHA is among the foremost interpreters of contemporary piano music of his generation. A champion of Australian music, he regularly commissions new work and has performed with the country’s leading contemporary ensembles and orchestras.

Phillip Houghton
Phillip Houghton’s guitar music has been performed and recorded by leading musicians, including John Williams and Timothy Kain. A self-taught composer, he drew on classical, jazz, rock, ambient and world music.

Keith Humble
Keith Humble won the National Critics Award in 1977 as the most outstanding recitalist working in Australia, and was appointed AM in 1982 for services to music. He was a constant champion of Australian contemporary music and of Percy Grainger.

Lê Tuấn Hùng
Lê Tuấn Hùng is a composer, performer and author, specialising in Vietnamese music and the experimental music of contemporary Australia. He has written widely on Vietnamese performing arts and is regarded as an international authority in Vietnamese musicology.

Miriam Hyde
Miriam Hyde (1913–2005) was an Australian composer, pianist and teacher whose lyrical, post-romantic voice is especially known through her piano music and works for students.

William Garnet James
William Garnet James (1892–1977) was an Australian pianist and composer who became a pioneer of music broadcasting as the ABC’s first Director of Music.

Elena Kats-Chernin
Elena Kats-Chernin AO (born 1957) is an Australian composer whose piano rags, chamber miniatures, ballet and stage scores have become central to contemporary Australian repertoire.

Linda Kouvaras
Linda Kouvaras is a pianist, composer and musicologist with a particular focus on contemporary Australian music. She has recorded, commissioned and premiered numerous new works for piano, and performs widely in city and regional centres.

Paul Moulatlet
Paul Moulatlet is a Melbourne-based Australian composer of contemporary chamber and electro-acoustic music. His works have been performed across Australia and in England, Italy, Norway and the USA.

Ian Munro
Ian Munro has emerged as one of Australia’s most distinguished and awarded musicians, a pianist and composer whose career has taken him to thirty countries across Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia.

Ron Nagorcka
Ron Nagorcka has a long-held interest in the sounds of the Australian bush, especially its birds, electronics in music, and just intonation. His nature recordings from Tasmania and arid mainland Australia provide the basis for many of his compositions.

Michelle Nelson
Michelle Nelson is a composer, guitarist and creative educator committed to developing instrumental works that are contemporary in voice yet draw on traditional composition practice.

Mark Pollard
Australian composer Mark Clement Pollard has an eclectic style that draws on improvisation, jazz, pop, minimalism and the indigenous musics of South-East Asia.

Thomas Reiner
Artistic Director of the ensemble re-sound, Thomas Reiner has received numerous awards for his compositions, including second prize in the International Witold Lutosławski Composers' Competition for Two Movements for Orchestra, the Dorian Le Gallienne Award, and the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award.

John Sangster
John Sangster (1928–1995) was an Australian jazz composer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist whose work stretched from traditional jazz and film scores to large-scale suites of uncommon range, humour and colour.

Peter Sculthorpe
Peter Sculthorpe (1929–2014) was a Tasmanian-born composer whose orchestral and chamber music drew the Australian landscape, neighbouring Asian traditions and Indigenous materials into a clear, personal language. He wrote extensively for strings, piano and voice.

Larry Sitsky
Larry Sitsky's activities as a composer, pianist, writer, broadcaster and teacher place him among the foremost ambassadors of contemporary Australian piano music. His work has made a lasting contribution to the Australian musical tradition.

Margaret Sutherland
Margaret Sutherland (1897–1984) was an Australian composer whose work ranged across almost every form, with a particular gift for chamber music. She remains one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century Australian composition.

Carl Vine
Carl Vine AO is one of Australia's best-known and most often performed composers, with an orchestral catalogue of eight symphonies and thirteen concertos. His piano music is played widely around the world, and recordings of his work appear on more than seventy albums across the major streaming services.

Julian Yu
Julian Yu is a multi-award-winning Australian composer whose musical language is imbued with elegance and expressiveness, both enhanced by impeccable craft and a special attention to detail.