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Photo: Rowan Davie

Ronan Apcar is an Australian pianist, musician, and composer with a reputation of versatility, edge, and tenacity. His experience and fluency across all kinds of music - jazz to the avant-garde, contemporary art music to house - translates into his exciting work as a musician. Described as "a talent far beyond his age" (Limelight Magazine), Ronan's musicmaking spans a diverse set of practices including performing, composing, arranging, improvising, curating, and collaborating.

Ronan is a graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium High School, where he studied with Huw Belling, and dux of the ANU School of Music, where he studied with a variety of Australian composers including Christopher Sainsbury, Jodie Blackshaw, Stephen Leek, Alexander Hunter, Kim Cunio, and Frank Millward. Ronan is also an alumnus of the Australian National Academy of Music, where he studied piano with Timothy Young.

Ronan's works tend to fall into one of two very different categories: serious-natured works often concerned with pathos, or light-hearted and sometimes silly works. Though he has experience writing for instrumentations of all sizes, most of his pieces are for small chamber ensembles and solo piano. He also enjoys creating and exploring improvised works and working in interdisciplinary collaborations, having created work with dancers, photographers, and DJs. In his performance projects, Ronan often writes and arranges music especially for his program as part of his curation.

Ronan has been privileged to receive commissions and recognitions for his work. He has received commissions from the National Carillon and The Women's College; his work Three Stages of Accepting an Ugly Self-Portrait was included in the suggested repertoire for and performed at the 2023 Sydney International Piano Competition; his work Preludes won the 2018 Willgoss Choral Composition Prize; he collaborated with Maria Zhdanovich and Jack Overall on Passing Electrical Storms in response to Shaun Gladwell's XR installation of the same name which they performed for the 2023 Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria; and he is currently creating a new audiovisual work with photographer Peter Hislop for the Canberra International Music Festival.

As a performer, Ronan is known for his dynamic and intense playing that goes beyond traditional pianism and his thoughtful and unconventional programming, often tying together disparate works into a unified theme. Currently, as the recipient of the ANU Love Supreme grant, Ronan is developing a new performance practice which uses electronic and digital instruments (with or without the grand piano) and blurs the line between performing, composing, and improvising.

Ronan Apcar — current to March 2025