TarraWarra Live featuring the Australian Art Orchestra
Description
A World Premiere of TarraWarra’s Inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor; Structures We Inherit, a new work by AAO Artistic Director Aaron Choulai; and AAO First Nations Artist in Residence, Adam Manning.
An afternoon of live music featuring the World Premiere of a new composition created specifically for TarraWarra Museum of Art by Biddy Connor, our inaugural Composer in Residence, along with a full program of new work performed and composed by the Australian Art Orchestra.
Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) and TarraWarra Museum of Art are proud to present TarraWarra Live featuring the World Premiere of our inaugural Composer in Residence Commission, along with new works by AAO Artistic Director Aaron Choulai and AAO First Nations Artist in Residence Adam Manning.
Each work in the TarraWarra Live series expresses the Museum’s values of Art, Place and Ideas across different disciplines, connecting audiences with newly commissioned creative works in live formats. Headlining the afternoon’s program is the World Premiere of a new composition by the inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor. The AAO will perform Connor’s new composition for string quartet, which sits at the intersection of music and visual art and draws inspiration from artworks in the Museum’s Collection and the surrounding landscape. Connor’s new work explores the resonant possibilities of tuning forks and strings, along with spatial improvisations across TarraWarra Museum’s garden and museum spaces.
Papua New Guinean-Australian composer and Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra, Aaron Choulai, will also be presenting his new work entitled Structures We Inherit. This new 20 min work for improvising chamber ensemble unfolds as a live, site-responsive composition shaped through sonokinetic conducting, a conducting language Choulai developed that allows the AAO to collectively form music in real time. Without the use of a fixed score, the music emerges through attentive listening, shared agency and moment-to-moment decision-making in a dialogue between the conductor and ensemble.
The afternoon highlights Kamilaroi percussionist and composer Adam Manning on clapsticks and auxiliary percussion, bringing rhythmic elements rooted in First Nations approaches and concepts into the composition. Adam Manning was the Australian Art Orchestra’s First Nations Artist in Residence in 2025. Manning is a musician, artist and researcher at the University of Newcastle, NSW. As an original Custodial Descendant of Kamilaroi Barray (Land), and a composer/percussionist and artist/designer, his rhythmic expression connects him to Land, People, Culture and Story and articulates the natural frequency (heartbeat) of Ngaya Barray (Mother Earth). His musical expertise has led him to share the stage with distinguished ensembles such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & the Australian Art Orchestra. His compositions have featured on ABC Classic, Ensemble Offspring, and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.
TarraWarra Live and our Composer in Residence program reflect the Australian Art Orchestra and TarraWarra Museum of Art's shared commitment to commissioning new Australian work, enabling cross-pollination between visual arts and music.
Lineup
Biddy O'Connor
Biddy Connor, (composer/performer/arranger) 2016 finalist in The Melbourne Music Prize Outstanding Musicians Award, is the Artistic Director for The Letter String Quartet, an innovative ensemble who push the sonic possibilities of the string quartet into new realms. Biddy has performed at / presented work at the Sydney Opera House, Adelaide Cabaret Festival, Dark MOFO, Queenscliff Music Festival, Womadelaide, Supersense Festival, Castlemaine State Festival, Darebin Arts Speakeasy, Ten Days on the Island and Melbourne Jazz Festival. Biddy has worked with Richard Frankland, Van Diemens Band, The Breeders (USA), Mick Harvey, Winged Victory for The Sullen (USA), Jherek Bischoff (USA), Jen Cloher, Thelma Plum, Holy Holy, John Cale, Liz Stringer, Angie Hart and the MESS Synthesiser Orchestra. In 2024 Biddy performed at the Aranya Theatre Festival, China with ‘Love’s Universe is Inside You’ (Vahideh Essai) and composed the music for the Flying Fruit Fly Circus’s show ‘Big Sky’, which had a season at the Sydney Opera House in September. In 2025 she worked on music for The World Came Flooding In, a VR project by Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerine. Biddy is a member of Golden Sands and works as the Special Projects Producer for Speak Percussion. Biddy was the 2021 Orange House by the Sea Resident Artist. She also featured with Steph O’Hara and Lizzy Welsh in the 2019 Little Operations.
Aaron Choulai
Aaron Choulai is an award winning and critically acclaimed pianist and composer whose work is recognised as innovating new directions in jazz, hip-hop and improvised music. From large scale multi media cross-cultural festival commissions. to Japanese hip-hop beat tapes, Choulai’s career spans over 20 years, crossing international borders and intersections between genre and culture. Born in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, and having lived in Tokyo for 15 years, Aaron Choulai is an artist of diverse culture and musical expression. Choulai began his career in Melbourne as a pianist before signing with the American record label Sunnyside records and moving to New York in the early 2000’s. While working during this time as a bandleader and sideman in America and Europe, Choulai’s profile as a composer and arranger grew while participating in projects such as The Black Arm Band (arr: 2007) We Don’t Dance For No Reason (comp: 2008) and Kate Ceberano (md: 2004 -2007) back in Australia. In 2008 he undertook postgraduate studies at theTokyo University of the Arts and after graduating in 2013, continued living in Tokyo where he has become a prominent figure in music in Japan. Aaron Choulai was awarded the Freedman Fellowship in Jazz (2014), the MEXT scholarship (2008) and was included in ‘The 100 most influential people in Melbourne’ by People Magazine (2005). He has collaborated with various artists including Archie Roach, Ruby Hunter, Ben Monder, Jim Black, Daichi Yamamoto, Slack, Alan Browne, Paul Grabowsky, Joel Frahm, Yoshimoto Akihiro and more.
Adam Manning
Adam Manning was born on Awabakal/Worimi Country and has Kamilaroi kinship. He is a musician, artist and researcher at the University of Newcastle, NSW. As an original Custodial Descendant of Kamilaroi Barray (Land), and a composer/percussionist and artist/designer, rhythmic expression connects me to Land, People, Culture and Story and articulates the natural frequency (heart beat) of Ngaya Barray (Mother Earth). Given this, my rhythmic expressions are articulated in varying forms. In the main, these varying rhythmic forms/expressions are both old and new, and or cross-disciplinary. He holds the endorsement of a prominent U.S. percussion instrument manufacturer, Latin Percussion. His musical expertise has led him to share the stage with distinguished ensembles such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & the Australian Art Orchestra. His compositions and research often blend traditional First Nations patterns and storytelling with modern percussive textures.
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