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Biographical Summary
Born in Adelaide in 1960, Andrew Schultz's musical education included
study at the Universities of Queensland and Pennsylvania and at King's
College London. His music, which covers a broad range of chamber, orchestral,
operatic and vocal works, has been performed, recorded and broadcast widely
by many leading groups and musicians and he is the recipient of awards
and prizes including a Fulbright Scholarship, the National Opera Award,
Arts Council Fellowships and APRA Classical Composition of the Year.
In 1982, after studying composition, conducting and clarinet at The University
of Queensland, Andrew Schultz held a Composer Fellowship from the Australia
Council. Subsequently, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to undertake
composition studies with George Crumb and conducting with Richard Wernick
in Philadelphia at The University of Pennsylvania in 1983. A Commonwealth
Scholarship and Fellowship Plan Award enabled him to study composition
with David Lumsdaine at King's College London. Moving back to Australia
in 1986, Schultz took up an appointment at the University of Wollongong
where he was Associate Dean and Director of a Research Centre. He was
awarded a Doctor of Philosophy by The University of Queensland in 1987
for his original compositions and thesis on the virtuosic solo music of
Luciano Berio and in 1990 was awarded his third Australia Council Composer
Fellowship. From 1997-2001, Schultz was Head of Composition and Music
Studies at the internationally renowned Guildhall School of Music and
Drama in London where he was also Artistic Director of the New Music Ensemble.
In 2002 he returned to the University of Wollongong and the post of Professor
of Composition and Dean, Faculty of Creative Arts.
Schultz has held fellowships and residencies, at the Leighton Studios,
Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada; Institute for Advanced Musical Studies,
University of London; as the Hazel Hincks Fellow at Villa Montalvo Centre
for the Arts, California; as a Visiting Professor at the Osaka College
of Music; and, as Principal External Examiner for the Royal Northern College
of Music, Manchester. He has held positions as Chair of the Board of Directors,
Australian Music Centre and Deputy Chair of the National Council of Tertiary
Music School Heads. Schultz has published on topics relating to new music
and analysis and is Editor of the Biographical Directory of Australian
Composers.
Pieces including Ekstasis, Dead Songs, Sea-Change, Barren Grounds and
Collide have entered the main repertoire of a number of musicians and
received many performances in Australia and abroad. His works have been
recorded extensively for radio broadcast and about twenty of his works
are currently available on compact disc release. His opera Black River
was given its premiere in 1989 by the Sydney Metropolitan Opera and Seymour
Group and won a national critics’ award for that year. It received
a second season in 1990 and was released as a feature film by Lucas Produkzions
in 1993. The film adaptation of this one act opera was awarded the Grand
Prix, Opera Screen, 1993 held at the Opera Bastille, Paris. The film has
since received screenings and television broadcasts in Australia, Europe
and Britain and at various festivals in North America and Europe. His
second opera, Going Into Shadows, received its premiere in London and
Brisbane in 2001 and has been described by one critic “as fine a
piece of modern composition as you could wish to hear” (Courier
Mail) and by another, as “a fine new addition to the operatic repertoire”
(Opera Now).
Other recent performances and broadcasts include “Mephisto”
at the Heads Up Festival of Australian Arts in London and at the Norwegian
Academy of Music in Oslo; the first performance and national broadcast
of a new piano trio, Tonic Continent by The Griffith Trio in Australia
and the Fiorini Trio in London; a programme of broadcast music on ABC-FM
to mark the composer’s fortieth birthday; Dead Songs and Attack
by the Kansai Modern Music Association in Kobe, Japan; 12 Variations for
Piano Duo at the Wigmore Hall, London and as a score for the WA Ballet;
and, Diver’s Lament in concert and broadcast by the BBC Symphony
Orchestra in London. Schultz contributed a reworking of Bach’s Contrapunctus
IX to a European project directed by Luciano Berio celebrating The Art
of Fugue. The project incorporated reworkings by Andriessen, Clementi
and Berio, amongst others, with performances in Spoleto, London, Den Haag
and Lyon in June 2001.
Journey to Horseshoe Bend (to a text by Gordon Kalton Williams) is a symphonic
cantata which had its first performance in May 2003 by the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra, Ntaria Ladies Choir and Sydney Philharmonia Motet Choir. It
drew an extraordinary public response in its premiere and critical plaudits.
One writer described it as "bridging a great divide, a cultural chasm
centuries long," (Gramophone Magazine) and another as an "important
work" and a "moving hymn to the transformative power of the
Australian landscape" (Sydney Morning Herald). The work has been
recorded for release on ABC Classics.
Schultz's most recent large-scale work is a setting of the Song of Songs with
a new text by poet Barry Hill. Scored for 18 voices and tape the work
was commissioned by ABC Radio's The Listening Room and The Song Company and
had its first performance at the Sydney Opera House in May 2004. The work uses
prerecorded voices and instruments and live singers to create a spatial tapestry
that explores the sensual and dramatic elements of the text. Writing in the
Sydney Morning Herald Peter McCallum explains, "Hill has arranged the love
songs in the Song of Songs into five movements with a quasi narrative progression
through attraction, consummation, loss and rediscovery. Using the image of
love near a city wall, he creates a dichotomy between inner desire and fecundity
and outer threat and decay, the fire of love and coldness of alienation. Schultz's
textures vary from the iridescent, closely voiced tonal harmonies of the first
song, Enchantment, to antiphonal dialogues between the live voices and their
shadows to the words "feed me" in the third movement, Feasting, to florid decoration
over static harmonies as though in a static transcendent mind-state and
tumbling erotic climaxes. "Song of Songs" was a finalist for Best Composition of the Year in the 2005 AMC-APRA Awards.
New works composed in 2006 include a short unaccompanied choral work, Wild flower, for the six singers of the Song Company to a text from the Old Testament prophet, Ezekiel. The work was commissioned by Bob Berghout of Newcastle, NSW and is dedicated to his wife Anita. The Meaning of Water is a work composed in early 2006 for the Kioloa Harp Ensemble led by prominent Canberra harpist, Alice Giles. The work was commissioned by the ensemble as one of a number of Australian works for the unusual and resonant grouping of seven harps. The Kioloa Harp ensemble draws on harpists from Australia and New Zealand and gave an international premiere to the work before a large audience of harpists at the American Harp Society Congress in San Francisco in June 2006. The work was funded by Arts ACT. Also in 2006, Schultz composed a new orchestral work for The Queensland Orchestra's 2007 season. Called Once upon a time... the ebullient seventeen minute work reflects on musical story-telling and childhood. It has prominent parts for some of the woodwind and brass, notably oboe, clarinet, horn and trombone. The work was commissioned by Symphony Australia.
During 2005-06, in addition to composing new short pieces for bass clarinet and piano (As) and horn and piano (Christmas Song) Schultz revised or prepared new editions of a number of earlier chamber or solo works including Dead Songs, Barren Grounds, Etudes Espace, Sea-Change, Duo Variations and Attack.
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra commissioned a new orchestral score called Endling that Schultz composed at the end of 2006 and at the start of 2007. The work was commissioned with the assistance of Symphony Australia. Endling is a ten minute work scored for two horns, timpani and strings. The first performance was in November 2007 in Hobart and Launceston in Maestro series concerts conducted by Arvo Volmer. Also in the summer of 2006-07, Schultz was commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts to write a new work for the Southern Cross Soloists – a fine Brisbane based chamber music group. The work’s title is Lines drawn from silence and it is scored for soprano, violin, wind quartet and piano. The text for the work contains phrases by Sir Isaac Newton on the topics of truth and discovery. The work was presented in the third of the ensemble’s 2007 subscription series in October at the Conservatorium Theatre in Brisbane with Natusko Yoshimoto the guest violinist.
In early 2007 Schultz composed a new ten minute work for solo violin, Sonatina. The work was commissioned for the 60th birthday celebrations of the great London based violinist and teacher, David Takeno. David celebrated his birthday in the presence of many of his most illustrious former students who performed two concerts of the Bach and Ysaye solo violin Sonatas at the Wigmore Hal in London over two nights in March 2008. As well, several new works were presented including the Violin Sonatina by Andrew Schultz performed by outstanding young British violinist, Jennifer Pike. She played the work brilliantly from memory and later in 2007 also recorded the work whilst on a visit to Singapore.
Another shorter work, After Nina, was composed in 2007 (immediately after the Violin Sonatina) for the new clarinet trio, The Endeavour Trio. Paul Dean – clarinet, Trish O’Brien - cello, and Stephen Emmerson – piano, present the work in various concerts in 2008.
The main project in 2007 was the composition of a new chamber opera, The Children’s Bach. The work was commissioned by the Melbourne based group, Chamber Made Opera and their Artistic Director Douglas Horton with the aid of an Australia Council Project Fellowship. The work is based on Helen Garner's novel of the same name and Glenn Perry has drawn a libretto from that novel. The work is of 80 minutes duration and scored for a cast of six and six instrumentalists.
2007 also saw the award to Schultz of the Schueler Award for Composition from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and the Elder Conservatorium, University of Adelaide.
Andrew Schultz, 2007©
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