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Photo: Tallulah Chong

The music of Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth has been described by Limelight magazine as featuring 'bold, innovative textures, and compelling melody'. His vivid musical language communicates a unique personal voice across orchestral, chamber, vocal and experimental music, and is coloured by three years spent in Japan, where his immersion in the study of the shakuhachi bamboo flute inevitably became a part of his muse. His compositions display a craft grounded upon the sensitive assimilation of musical sources, a rare technical skill in sonic construction, and a highly imaginative deployment of ideas. It is therefore no surprise that he is at the forefront of his generation of Australian composers.

Winning the prestigious Paul Lowin Prize for orchestral composition in 2016 established Skipworth's reputation, and is a significant marker of the broader industry recognition of his talent. The winning work, his Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, also earned the Performance of the Year APRA Art Music Award for its premiere performance by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, and was chosen by ABC Classic FM to be presented at the 2016 International Rostrum of Composers in Poland.

Skipworth's works attract further international attention on a regular basis. Spiritus won the 2017 Albert H Maggs award and was also selected by the New England Philharmonic from over 200 submissions as the winner of their annual call for scores for performance in 2018. The International Society for Contemporary Music selected his Dark Nebulae and Clarinet Quintet as the official Australian work presented at their World Music Days in Slovenia (2015) and Vancouver (2017) respectively. In 2017, the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus commissioned his Hymns in Reverie for performance at the Dai-Ichi Seimei Hall. His latest work Breath of Thunder for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Japanese drumming group Taikoz is a culmination of his time spent in Japan learning shakuhachi and developing his deep understanding of its ancient musical culture.

Skipworth holds degrees from the University of Western Australia (B.Mus.Ed) and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music (M.Mus., Ph.D.) where he studied with composers Roger Smalley and Anne Boyd respectively. Further afield, he spent two semesters in Germany undertaking a kontaktstudium at the Freiburg Hochschule fur Musik with leading international composer and clarinettist Prof. Jorg Widmann. Skipworth's main shakuhachi teachers are the revered masters Kakizakai Kaoru and Yokoyama Katsuya.

Lachlan Skipworth — current to September 2018