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.
His works have been commissioned by Elision, Pipeline, the Astra Choir, the Australian Chamber Soloists and Michael Kieran Harvey, among others.
From 2010, site-specific elements feature in many of his collaborative works. These have included Resonating Spaces projects in Vancouver, Edinburgh, Beijing, Singapore and the Cook Islands, and installation projects in Australia with the Melbourne Zoo, the Melbourne Museum, Scienceworks and the Royal Melbourne Hospital.
He is Professor of Interactive Composition at the University of Melbourne and teaches composition at the Victorian College of the Arts. He completed a Master's degree at La Trobe University and has been awarded several prizes, including the 1993 Spivakovsky Award, the 1992 Maggs Award, and a finalist place in the Third Tokyo International Composition Contest in 1988.
Recordings of his music range from ambient chamber works such as A Handful of Rain (MD 3218) and Dusting Off Roses (MCD 088) to piano, flute, guitar, string quartet and percussion pieces across the Australian contemporary repertoire.
Compositions by Mark Pollard appear on
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.
Coil: Australian Music for Solo Percussion
Claire Edwardes had already marked the Australian contemporary music scene after the ABC Young Performer of the Year award in 1999 and the Freedman Fellowship in 2005. Back from European study and performance, she was active in new-music ensembles and building a solo career.
Mark Pollard is a member of
Gongworks Gamelan
Gongworks was set up in 1997 by Mark Pollard to create new work through the fusing of cross cultural and cross media materials. Sound, theatre and ritual are essential elements in a Gongworks performance.