Nirmali Fenn

Nirmali Fenn is a Sri Lankan-born Australian composer. She received her initial music education at the universities of New South Wales and Melbourne, graduating with high distinction. With the support of a prestigious Clarendon Fund Scholarship, she later completed her doctorate in music at Oxford University, UK. She has worked in the faculties of the University of Hong Kong, New York University, the University of New South Wales, Yale-NUS College Singapore and is currently based in New York at Stony Brook University.

Nirmali’s music often involves a lot of theatre and she has collaborated with some of Asia’s most respected choreographers, such as Pun Siu Fai and Daniel Leung. Her collaboration with the Guangdong Modern Dance Company opened the 9th Guangdong Dance Festival in Guangzhou, China, in 2012.

Nirmali has served as composer-in-residence at a number of major European festivals, most notably the Lakes District Summer Music Festival in the UK and the Saxophone Habanera Festival in Poitiers, France. Of the first performance of her song cycle Over Exposed at the Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris, Le Monde praised it as standing out in the genre of ‘songs’ of today” and La Croix described it as “deeply moving”. Her compositions have been performed by the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Ensemble Linea, Kuss Quartet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tinalley String Quartet, Sounds Underground, Endymion Ensemble, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Ensemble Concorde, S.E.M. Ensemble and the Eastman Broadband Ensemble.

Through her music, Nirmali often challenges performers to “see” with their ears and construct spatial “views” of their surroundings. She believes that sound is a tool that gives audiences the opportunity to experience the volume of the space in which they exist.