Full Bio

Chris’ music is elemental and monolithic, as ‘elegant in the making as in the made’. Ideas of growth and form, emergence, drift and self-similarity, appropriated from biology, as well as precepts that have resonance across art-forms, science, and nature like colour, line, shape, pattern and process inform and permeate his music, which the Philadelphia Inquirer recently called “a lovely shade of wistful”.

Winner of the composition prize of the Australian International Chopin Competition, Chris has twice been featured at the Gaudeamus Muzeikweek in the Netherlands, and attended the Takefu International Music Festival in Japan, at the invitation of its artistic director, Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa.

Major works have been commissioned by The Song Company, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and Carnegie Hall. Chris’ piece ‘a golden string’ (selected by Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir, as the winner of the Blake Society’s Tithe Grant), was the featured musical work for the unveiling of William Blake’s new gravestone in 2018. Sung by Sansara, the work has also been broadcast on the BBC.

In addition to concert music, Chris’ Theatre Music credits include ‘Cosi’, for the Melbourne and Sydney Theatre Companies, the Australian Premiere of ‘A Doll's House, Part 2’ for the Melbourne Theatre Company, and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and ‘Cloud Nine’ for the Sydney Theatre Company. Chris’ songs and music for the latter were nominated for best original score at the Sydney Theatre Awards, while the Daily Review noted his “brilliantly unsettling music” for the former, at the Sydney Opera House.

Chris was the inaugural ‘Friends of the National Library of Australia’ Creative Arts Fellow. As part of this fellowship he worked with Sydney Chamber Opera on a workshop performance of his operatic scena, ‘The truth of the flowers’.

Chris completed his Master’s in Composition at the University of Oxford and is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He is currently a PhD candidate at Duke University. During his time at Carnegie Hall, he worked with then composer-in residence Kaija Saariaho. Previously, Chris was one of only six composers worldwide to be selected by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, to attend his Advanced Composition course at the Dartington International Summer School, England. His work has been performed by The Song Company, The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, the Cavaleri Quartet and The Australian Voices, with whom he was previously young composer-in-residence.

Chris was awarded the Joyful Company of Singers Young Composer Prize, and was selected for the Tenso Young Composers workshop, held in Sweden as part of the Nordic Music Days, where his music was workshopped by Eric Ericsons Kammarkör under the guidance of James Wood.

His composition teachers have included Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Nigel Butterley, Robert Saxton, John Supko and Scott Lindroth.

Chris is a fully Represented Artist at the Australian Music Centre and is represented by Aurora Artists’ Management