Composer Peggy Polias

Composer Peggy Polias, Australia

Peggy Polias is a composer and music typesetter based in Sydney. Polias prepares scores, instrumental parts and other print music materials for some of Australia’s leading composers. In 2010 she graduated with a Master of Music (Composition), supervised by Professor Anne Boyd at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Polias has had works performed and workshopped by Kammerklang, Ku-Ring-Gai Philharmonic Orchestra, Halcyon, Chronology Arts, and at the Australian Youth Orchestra National Music Camp and Canberra International Music Festival. She is an Associate Represented Artist with the Australian Music Centre.

In 2015 recordings of her works Electro Fractal Gamelan (2011) and Phlogiston (2014) were released on the digital album BETA by Kammerklang. 2015 has also seen the commencement of a collaboration with composer Lisa Cheney on the project Making Waves, an online listening project focusing on early-career Australian composers.

Polias explores the influences of Javanese Gamelan, minimalism, feminism, fractals and handicrafts in her music, and takes a keen interest in the possibilities for music in the online space.

Diabelli’s original Variations anthology is an intriguing exercise in group creativity and also, curiously, in networking and marketing.  Lia Jensen-Abbott’s expansion of this idea via the Albion College Diabelli Squared Project is a fun way to connect heritage works with new ideas from living composers.  I very much enjoyed creating a personal composerly take on Diabelli’s theme, and with 200 years of evolving musical language since the original collection I am most excited to see and hear the responses to the theme from other composers!

Peggy Polias