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Photo: Carolyn Hide - Cazeil Creative

Rowen Fox was born in 1978 in regional South Australia's Riverland along the River Murray, growing up on a farm in Overland Corner before his family moved to Barmera. As a child, he had piano lessons and discovered a love of singing and performing with his local youth theatre. Moving to Adelaide, he attended the Elder Conservatorium, where he studied composition and ethnomusicology with Peter Brideoake, who inspired in him a love of Chinese classical music. He received his Bachelor of Music Composition from the Elder Conservatorium in 2001, having also studied composition with Grahame Dudley and Graeme Koehne, conducting with Carl Crossin, and formal singing training with Florin Radulescu. In 2012-2016, he undertook his Masters of Composition from the Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney under the supervision of Anne Boyd.

Since 2011, Rowen has resided in the NSW Blue Mountains, where he works as a well-known choral conductor, singing teacher and composer. He particularly specialises in writing vocal and choral music, and music for the theatre and live performance. Rowen is most interested in the power of music as an emotional and spiritual force. He finds himself inspired by the natural world, and many of his compositions had their genesis in the emotions of his travels through spectacular landscapes. The Australian landscape currently inspires Rowen's writing, in particular that of his Blue Mountains home, and the arid interior of his earliest childhood memories.

Emerging from Rowen's studies of Chinese classical music, was the full-length chamber opera, Chang'E and the Moon, which premiered at the Sydney Conservatorium and in Wentworth Falls in 2016. Chang'E and the Moon grew out of Rowen's deep regard for Chinese classical literature and music, and is an inspired retelling of the myth of the Chinese Goddess of the Moon, Chang'E. The opera is also a poem to the physical moon as a part of our landscape, and a meditation on nature's cycles, reflecting Rowen's interest in philosophical Taoism.

Notable recent instrumental commissions include his first Wind Quintet (2020), and Sonata for Horn and Piano (2018). Notable choral music commissions include, by Phoenix Choir Blue Mountains, new choruses for Albert Morris, an oratorio based on the life of the pioneering Broken Hill bush regenerator, and All This is Ended (2018), a setting of Rupert Brooke's 1914 poem The Dead, commissioned by the Department of Veterans' Affairs as a part of the Armistice Centenary Grants Program, and dedicated to the memory of all those, civilian and military, who lost their lives in the Great War.

Rowen Fox — current to January 2025