2024 SOUNZ Contemporary Award

Thursday 29 AUGUST

SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music, with APRA AMCOS NZ, is thrilled to announce the finalists for the 2024 SOUNZ Contemporary Award | Te Tohu Auaha, celebrating excellence in contemporary composition:

Ihlara McIndoe for Mirror Traps

Nathaniel Otley for the convergence of oceans

Karlo Margetić for In All Directions

The finalists were selected by a judging panel of independent industry representatives, including international representative Manuela Kerer (Italy):

“It was a great honour for me to take part in this year's SOUNZ Contemporary Award as a jury member. I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of styles and aesthetics represented in the submissions, which were all characterised by very high quality, with the musical references to New Zealand itself also playing a wonderfully important role. I was deeply impressed and since music and art always says something about a society, my admiration for New Zealand has grown even stronger than it already was. It was not an easy decision, but the dialogue with my jury colleagues was so constructive, high-caliber and collegial that I think we were able to reach a very good decision.”

The panel, which included New Zealanders Dugal McKinnon, Sarah Watkins, Justin DeHart, and Helen Bowater, commented on the very high quality of the submissions this year, demonstrated in the 61 entries from 51 composers.

First-time finalist, Ihlara McIndoe, has been nominated for her work Mirror Traps, for soprano and chamber ensemble.

Ihlara says, “I'm thrilled that ‘Mirror Traps’ has been selected as a finalist this year! In ‘Mirror Traps’, I sought to present a sense of the lyrical yet angular, simile cascading, effortlessly shifting, flowing, fragmented, ironic, tender (and more) qualities of Hera Lindsay Bird's text. I feel so fortunate to have had the opportunity to draw on the text of one of my favourite Aotearoa poets, and am grateful to Hera for allowing me this privilege. I'm hugely appreciative to Ensemble Court-Circuit and soprano Johanna Vargas for their tender performance, the Royaumont Abbaye and Foundation who provided the opportunity for me to attend the Voix Nouvelles Academy and Festival de Royaumont where ‘Mirror Traps’ was performed in 2023, and France Musique for such a tremendous recording.

Find out more about Mirror Traps by Ihlara McIndoe.

Nathaniel Otley, a second-time finalist for the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, has been nominated for his work the convergence of oceans, for orchestra.

Nathaniel says, “I’m absolutely delighted to have my work ‘the convergence of oceans’ selected as a finalist for this year's SOUNZ Contemporary Award and to have the opportunity to be a part of this celebration of some of the amazing and varied compositional work being created by artists from Aotearoa. It was such an immense privilege to be the NZSO National Youth Orchestra composer in residence for 2023 and I’m just so thrilled that the work that the incredible young musicians in the orchestra put into finding and breathing life into the work has the opportunity to be recognised through being a finalist for this award.

It's such a rare opportunity as a composer to get to write a work for orchestra where you know exactly who will play it and where. Having this knowledge through the National Youth Orchestra composer in residence position really allowed me to seek to craft a work I thought would be meaningful for both the orchestra and the occasion. When doing this, the idea of convergence kept resurfacing. The National Youth Orchestra is, after all, an annual convergence of some of Aotearoa’s incredible young musical talent, and when considering how to write a work that suited this, the ocean, which surrounds and us here in Aotearoa and is constantly converging and changing, emerged as an ideal extramusical connection for this ecologically minded exploration of sound.”

Find out more about the convergence of oceans by Nathaniel Otley.

Past winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, Karlo Margetić, has been nominated for his work In All Directions, for orchestra.

Karlo says, “It's such an honour to be nominated again for Te Tohu Auaha | SOUNZ Contemporary Award. The award is a wonderful celebration of composition in Aotearoa and I'm looking forward to getting to know the work of the other finalists.

'In All Directions' started as a set of piano pieces. I was at a loose end during one of our lockdowns and needed a project as a distraction, so I wrote this set of five stubborn, single-minded miniatures. Each one focuses on one idea: ascending and descending interval cycles, a layered 12-tone row, a labyrinth of repeats, an insistent cluster, and an agglomeration of disintegrating echoes of the previous movements. Later on, I made the orchestral version, modifying and expanding the pieces in the process of translating the limited source material to a larger medium. My thanks to Hamish McKeich and the NZSO for the performance, and the team at RNZ for a fantastic recording at the NZ Composer Sessions in 2023.”

Find out more about In All Directions by Karlo Margetić

The winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award | Te Tohu Auaha will be announced at the 2024 APRA Silver Scroll Awards to be held at the St James Theatre in Wellington on Tuesday 8 October.

The SOUNZ Contemporary Award | Te Tohu Auaha, celebrating its 27th anniversary this year, recognises New Zealand compositions demonstrating outstanding levels of creativity and inspiration and has been presented in collaboration with APRA AMCOS NZ since 1998. Read more about the Award and its past winners and finalists, and explore their works here.

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