Ross Edwards

Ross Edwards
(b Sydney, 23 Dec 1943). Australian composer. After attending the NSW Conservatorium, Sydney, he enrolled at the University of Sydney, studied composition with Meale and worked as assistant to Sculthorpe, and then studied with Maxwell Davies and Veress at the University of Adelaide.

His music was heard at the ISCM festivals at Stockholm (1966) and Basel (1970), and he moved to Britain for further studies with Davies in 1970. This was followed by a period living in a farmhouse in Yorkshire, and he returned to Australia in 1972. From 1973 he taught at the University of Sydney (taking the DMus in 1991), but he has chiefly been a freelance composer, filling commissions for the ABC orchestras, the major Australian contemporary ensembles and occasionally ensembles such as the Fires of London. He was Australia Council Don Banks fellow (1989–90), then an Australia Council creative arts fellow (1990–93 and 1995–7)

Edwards at first wrote music using the acerbic, atonal techniques favoured by his teachers in the late 1960s; these early works are for solo or chamber groups, such as the Monos series for solo instruments (1970–72). But in isolation in Yorkshire during 1971 he crafted a more independent and distinctive language, seeking its sources in nature or in techniques beyond the constraints of European serialism, and aimed at more effective communication with the listener. His language came to espouse two principal styles. The first is characterized by a mood of serenity and meditation, at times influenced by the static patterns of certain Asian musics, as in Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist (1973) and The Hermit of the Green Light (1979). The second is a more vibrant, rhythmically energetic mood, often drawing its materials from coastal NSW, as he became interested in the arrangement into abstract patterns of natural elements such as the sounds of insects. The Tower of Remoteness (1978) and Yarrageh (1989) are examples, as are, best known, the Maninyas series (1981–8), which began with a set of nonsense syllables and appealing melodic fragments, from which he produced works of great gaiety and rhythmic buoyancy. ‘I've evolved a highly subjective method of topographical symbolism’, he has written. ‘The art of composition has come to represent a ritualistic search for the life force underlying our sterile, material society’. His orchestral works, including the widely played Piano Concerto (1982), the Maninyas Violin Concerto (1988) and the Symphony ‘Da pacem Domine’ (1990–91) have gained him wide attention. Austere and compelling, his has become one of the most convincing voices of Australian music.