BIOGRAPHY

Hilary Kleinig a multi-skilled musician whose work involves performing, composing, curating and directing. She is passionate about commissioning and playing new music, enabling and creating meaningful collaborations and inspiring new audiences.

She is cellist with and Artistic Director of Zephyr Quartet (a string quartet who delight in the exploration of diverse music and forging dynamic collaborations) and also performs as a freelance musician for ensembles, orchestras and bands, specialising in period baroque music and experimental, amplified improvisation. Hilary composes music for film, dance, theatre and ensembles that often combines live instrumental performance with technology, field recordings and found sounds.

Composer website:  https://hilarykleinig.com/

FEATURED WORKS

For Those Who’ve Come Across The Seas, for string quartet & smartphone choir.

I started collecting media and people’s posts from social media concerning Australia’s treatment of ‘boat people’ with the intention of using them as impetus for writing a piece of music. For Those Who’ve Come Across The Seas is partly a reflection on Australia’s current policies regarding those who arrive by boat to our country. The contradiction of our current policies to words in our national anthem is striking and concerning, especially as it is quite clear that some Australians feel that they certainly do not have ‘boundless plains to share’.

For those… is also an ode to ‘boat people’ and to the contribution that they have made to our country, past and present. It is a celebration of just how positively these lines in our national anthem have influenced our country’s development, making it into the wonderful, colourful place it is. For this piece the audience is invited to download or play via live streaming an accompanying audio track thus forming a choir to accompany the quartet’s live performance.

Featured in Ambient Waves, October 2017

Lux in tenebris! In tenebris lux! for chamber choir, string quartet and piano.

Lux in tenebris! (Light in the darkness!) is a meditation on hope that I wrote for the Adelaide Chamber Singers & Zephyr Quartet, scored to a poem written by my father. It seeks to explore people’s desire to seek and find hope in the bleakest of circumstances and is also inspired by the paradox of light and dark – physically and metaphorically; how we really can’t have one without the other, or how, if we were to, it would make the other less significant, less important, or even null and void. Mysteriously and wonderfully, light shines brightest in the deepest darkness.

Featured in the playlist Vocal Waves II – August 2019.