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Martin Friedel's music traverses a wide range of forms and genres. He has composed six chamber operas, four large-scale cantatas, chamber and choral music and many scores for film and television. Major awards include the Australian One Act Opera Award, the Ian Potter Music Commission, the Jacobena Angliss Fellowship and an Emmy.

Friedel came to Australia with his family from Germany as a child. His family settled in Narbethong, a small saw milling settlement on the Great Dividing Range in Victoria, and he went on to complete bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics and a PhD in chemistry from Melbourne University. Concurrently, he studied piano with Victor Stephenson and, later, conducting with Robert Rosen.

Since the 1980s he composed for film and television. Friedel has created over fifty TV and film soundtracks for BBC, French and US television, ABC and SBS, receiving an Emmy, international awards and two AFI nominations.

Friedel's early experience and reputation in the 1970s was established in theatre. In the 1970s he composed and directed for a multitude of productions at the Pram Factory, Melbourne Theatre Company and other major Australian theatre companies.

Fed by his experience as a visiting composer at the fabled Berliner Ensemble in 1981, he went on to compose music theatre pieces that were performed in the Edinburgh and Adelaide Festivals. Friedel remains fascinated by the interaction between words and music and writes texts and libretti for his own compositions.

Since 1985, the Melbourne-based ASTRA has premiered many of his chamber and vocal compositions, most recently (2008) Invisible Landscapes for piano and instrumental sextet with Michael Kieran Harvey (piano) and (2009) Airsongs for violin and piano, commissioned and performed by Miwako Abe and Michael Kieran Harvey.

History of a Day, a multi-screen audiovisual installation, created with cinematographer Simon Carroll and commissioned and presented by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), was part of the opening exhibition at the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide in 2007.

Current work includes a new performance of the cantata Cities of the Mind, originally commissioned by the Ian Potter Foundation, and a new music theatre piece Underworld Song, commenced while Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria. His collection of piano pieces The School of Natural Philosophy has been recorded by Michael Kieran Harvey for Move Records.

Martin Friedel — current to June 2010