BIOGRAPHY

Nikki Edgar is a cellist and composer who specialises in improvisation in a contemporary classical music context. She is currently studying cello performance at Monash University with Josephine Vains, where she explores new readings of mainstream solo repertoire. As a member of the Monash Art Ensemble directed by Paul Grabowsky, she performed in 2016 with free jazz trumpet soloist Thomasz Stańko at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. Nikki performed a solo work of her own as part of the VCE Top Acts at the Melbourne Recital Centre and Deakin Edge, Federation Square.

As an outcome from a composition workshop she took part in directed by Lizzy Welsh, Ben Opie and Melissa Doecke, she was commissioned to write a work for Inventi Ensemble, and has had a composition of hers workshopped by the Australian String Quartet. She was a participant in the 2016 Tilde New Music and Sound Art Academy and Festival and performed in the 2016 Future Creatives Music Festival at Second Story in Collingwood. In 2015 Nikki received funding from the Midland Express newspaper and Theatre Royal in Castlemaine to undertake a performance and study tour to Germany with a string ensemble.

Composer website: https://soundcloud.com/nikki-edgar-comp

FEATURED WORKS

Severed Gizmo, for accordion.

“Severed Gizmo is a compilation of multiple samples of my accordions broken at different times throughout the past year, focusing on showing unaltered acoustic sounds. Majority of the samples were recorded a few minutes at a time of improvised passages.

These sounds were a surprise to me!”

Featured in Temporal Waves – June 2017, curated by Mark Wolf.