Biography

After freelancing for five years in Germany, composer and conductor Gordon Hamilton took over in 2009 as Artistic Director of one of Australia’s foremost vocal ensembles, The Australian Voices.

Recently Gordon has composed three works for the Queensland Symphony Orchestra: Ghosts in the Orchestra (2014), The Trillion Souls (2015) and Thum Prints (2015, a concerto for beatboxer Tom Thum with orchestra).

His 50-minute choral opera MOON (2011), relates the story of Diana the lonely moon who sends out her moonbeams in search of love. MOON has toured Australia, Germany and to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Under a more cheeky guise, Gordon reassembles the contributions of unwitting collaborators. His Tra$h Ma$h (for choir, 2012) reassembles fleeting grabs from pop songs. Toy Story 3 = Awesome! (for choir, 2011) – sets a stream of inane consciousness as spat out by his own Facebook news feed. In 2015 Gordon sound-designed the Riverfire fireworks display for the Brisbane Festival.

In 2016 Gordon will compose for the WDR Funkhausorchester (Cologne), as well as conduct the Queensland and Manilla Symphony Orchestras.

Composer website: www.hamilton-g.com

Featured Works

Who Are We?, for voices.

Who Are We? is a composition of mine, sung here by The Australian Voices. I intended this as an atheist hymn, marvelling at the enormity of the universe. The text is by the great scientist, communicator and atheist, Carl Sagan:

We find that we live
on an insignificant planet
of a humdrum star
lost in a galaxy
in some forgotten corner of a universe
containing far more galaxies than people.

Featured in Playlist 10 – Existential Waves (31/10/2015)