Christine McCombe

After initial studies in composition at the University of Melbourne and the Victorian College of the Arts, Christine moved to the UK in 1997 to study with James MacMillan at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, and later completed a PhD in composition at the University of Edinburgh.

Composition prizes and awards include the The Dorian Le Galienne Composition Award, The Lyrebird Music Society A.N.A. Prize for Composition, a Keith and Elizabeth Murdoch Fellowship (VCA), a student bursary from the Centre Acanthes (France), a Bundanon Artists Trust Residency and she was the 2018 winner of the Pythia Prize for composition.

Christine’s musical influences include Bach, Messiaen and Radiohead. Her work covers a range of styles from chamber music to electroacoustic composition and video with performances by leading ensembles and soloists, both in Australia and Internationally, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, soloists from the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Vienna Piano Trio, Topology Ensemble and the Australia Ensemble.

Recent performances include the premiere of Violent Clouds for bass flute, soprano and soundscape at the 2016 Resonant Bodies Festival in New York; the premiere of Ebb Tide for contralto, cello, clarinet and percussion at the NGV / Federation Square Melbourne in September 2017 and premieres of commissioned works for Plexus (2018) and Rubiks Collective (2019) at the Melbourne Recital Centre.

Three kinds of silence, a new CD of her chamber music, was released on Tall Poppies records in 2018.

Biography taken from composer’s website.