Biography

Cat Hope’s music is conceptually driven, using mostly graphic scores, acoustic/electronic combinations and new score reading technologies. It often features aleatoric elements, drone, noise, glissandi and an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound. Her composed music ranges from works for laptop duet to orchestra, with a focus on chamber works, and in 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to develop her work, and a Visby International Composers residency in Sweden.
Her practice explores the physicality of sound in different media, and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire (UK, 2013), Limelight (Aus, 2012) and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft (Ger, 2012). Her works have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her work has been awarded a
range of prizes including the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011, 2014 and the Peggy Glanville Hicks residency in 2014.

Composer website:  www.cathope.com

Featured Works

The Fourth Estate, for piano, 2 AM radios and e-bows.

“The Fourth Estate” is a societal, political or institutional force whose influence is not officially recognised, and is a term often used to refer to the press. It’s original use relates to the three estates of the realm: clergy, nobility and commoners. Australia in particular has seen just how powerful ‘unofficial’ voices can be, through monopolisation of the media, editorialised media reporting and political bias. The Fourth Estate is a work that compares the sonoric qualities of the piano with those of small electronic devices that extend and contrast with it. Small voices that have the ability to change everything. As the Fourth Estate is thought to be an element of society ‘outside’ official recognition, here the electronics attempt to pull the piano into a different sound world outside its usual realm.

Featured in Immersive Waves (1/02/2016).

PODCAST

Cat Hope was interviewed for the Making Conversation: Australian Composers’ Podcast, Episode 29, 2016.