Katy Abbott
Katy Abbott’s music is refreshingly genuine. She is part of a new wave of composers who emerged after the style wars that dominated Australian music in the nineties, and her work has no hint of either forced intellectualism or fluffy popularism.
Her prolific output of over 70 works reflects her interests in pop and vocal music, which she spices with edgy effects. Melody is used as a structural tool and is layered, twisted and sullied by experimental techniques.
Her chamber works span her career to date and are perhaps the best example of her capacity to immediately engage the audience in an evocative sound world. Each one has a strong sense of place or person, crafted with assertive clarity. Human qualities of beauty, melancholy and satire radiate from pieces like MultiSonics and No Ordinary Traveller, while her landscapes shimmer with heat waves (Sunburnt Aftertones) or resound with calls to prayer (Egyptian Wish). This is poetic, assertive music that is jubilantly of its time. Rosalind Appleby, music critic and author, 2010.
Katy Abbott creates music that can be described as contemporary classical, drawing from diverse influences. She has a particular skill for highlighting the musicality and poignancy of moments in daily human life that might otherwise seem mundane. Later compositions have also explored the concept of home and a sense of place. Her impressive body of work includes orchestral, chamber and vocal pieces.
She is an award-winning, acclaimed and widely published composer whose work has been performed in Australia and overseas by leading ensembles and several major symphony orchestras. Her music has featured at events in Europe, China, the USA, Canada and New Zealand. Abbott studied composition with Brenton Broadstock and Linda Kouvaras at the University of Melbourne, completed her Masters in 2002 and her PhD in 2007. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and three sons, and holds an artist space at Abbotsford Convent.
Artist's website: katyabbott.com
Katy Abbott is featured on the following titles
Bushfire Dreams
Four marvellous works by Melbourne composers appear here in superb performances by the Ormond Quartet, resident at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music between 2016 and 2018. Lotte Betts-Dean joins them for Katy Abbott’s work.
Compositions by Katy Abbott also appear on
Midnight Songs
Three is a Melbourne-based trio of trumpet, trombone and guitar. With little extant repertoire for this combo, the group commissioned four Melbourne composers and pairs those works with Jane Hammond’s arrangement of Percy Grainger’s Random Round.
Kingfisher
This CD is the result of a daring project to commission 21 composers to write new works for Halcyon's two singers, Jenny Duck-Chong and Alison Morgan. Presented over two concerts in their 15th anniversary year, and then recorded at Trackdown.
Inspirations
They say there is nothing new under the sun. New works of art challenge this notion. In this piano recording by Ian Holtham, all the works, commissioned from his Melbourne composer colleagues, are responses to major works in the piano literature. Something new has arisen, phoenix-like, out of something old.