Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Composer and sound artist Nicole Smede reflects on her experience of Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers Program and the creation of her new work Garan (Wings of Birds). Inspired by the flight patterns of birds and the connection between earth and sky, she explores composition as a form of deep listening and relationship with Country.

I was first invited to submit an expression of interest for the 2024 Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers program after meeting Dr Christopher Sainsbury during my 2022 Space to Create fellowship at ANU. The opportunity arrived expansively - a continuation of what I care most about: music as story, connection, and cultural continuation. I was honoured to take part alongside a remarkable group of First Nations composers. After completing the 2024 program, I was again invited to further develop my compositional practice in a second round, deepening both skill and intuition.

My background is in classical music; I studied vocal performance at the Sydney Conservatorium. Though I didn't follow the traditional path of a classical singer, that training shaped how I listen and build sound; how breath, silence, and resonance can shape emotion. Through Ngarra-Burria, I began to understand how those instincts belong within a broader compositional language, one that can hold both notation and intuition, tradition and Country.

My new work for this year's program, Garan (Wings of Birds), takes its title from Gathang, the language of the Birrbay, Guringay, and my Warrimay ancestors. The idea came one morning while drinking coffee on my verandah, watching a murmuration twist and turn across the sky. At first, there was only one bird weaving above rooftops, then many - a flock moving in perfect synchrony before vanishing southward. That motion, that quiet choreography, became the seed of the work.

Written for Ensemble Offspring, Garan mirrors that motion in sound. The piano follows the circular path of the flock; the clarinet, the arc of a lone bird; and the percussion breathes between them with brushes, chimes, and bows evoking feathers, wings, and wind, blending scored and improvised sections, giving each musician room to respond to the sound world and to each other.

Birds hold deep significance in Aboriginal culture. They are totems, messengers, and kin, connecting us to Sky Country where our ancestors dwell among the stars, moving between worlds, carrying stories, warnings, and wisdom. In Garan, I wanted to evoke that movement of spirit and message crossing sky to land, sound to silence.

When I hear the ensemble bring the piece to life, I feel a sense of widening, as if the room itself becomes sky. I hope audiences feel that, too: an opening, an invitation to attune to what hovers just beyond hearing. What messages are being carried above us, and what might they be trying to say?

Ngarra-Burria reminds me that stories can be told in endless ways, through melody, rhythm, timbre, vibration, resonance, and breath. The program has expanded my collaborative practice, bridging soundscape, field recording, language, and ensemble. Each composition becomes another act of listening, a return to Country through sound.

Garan (Wings of Birds) will premiere on 15 October 2025 at Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Ultimo, performed by Ensemble Offspring as part of the Ngarra-Burria: First Peoples Composers concert series.