TarraWarra Live featuring the Australian Art Orchestra

A World Premiere of TarraWarra’s Inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor; Structures We Inherit, a new work by AAO Artistic Director Aaron Choulai; and AAO First Nations Artist in Residence, Adam Manning.

An afternoon of live music featuring the World Premiere of a new composition created specifically for TarraWarra Museum of Art by Biddy Connor, our inaugural Composer in Residence, along with a full program of new work performed and composed by the Australian Art Orchestra.

TarraWarra Live, Biddy Connor playing viola. Photo © Bryony Jackson

Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) and TarraWarra Museum of Art are proud to present TarraWarra Live featuring the World Premiere of our inaugural Composer in Residence Commission, along with new works by AAO Artistic Director Aaron Choulai and AAO First Nations Artist in Residence Adam Manning.

Each work in the TarraWarra Live series expresses the Museum’s values of Art, Place and Ideas across different disciplines, connecting audiences with newly commissioned creative works in live formats. Headlining the afternoon’s program is the World Premiere of a new composition by the inaugural Composer in Residence, Biddy Connor. The AAO will perform Connor’s new composition for string quartet, which sits at the intersection of music and visual art and draws inspiration from artworks in the Museum’s Collection and the surrounding landscape. Connor’s new work explores the resonant possibilities of tuning forks and strings, along with spatial improvisations across TarraWarra Museum’s garden and museum spaces. Papua New Guinean-Australian composer and Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra, Aaron Choulai, will also be presenting his new work entitled Structures We Inherit. This new 20 min work for improvising chamber ensemble unfolds as a live, site-responsive composition shaped through sonokinetic conducting, a conducting language Choulai developed that allows the AAO to collectively form music in real time. Without the use of a fixed score, the music emerges through attentive listening, shared agency and moment-to-moment decision-making in a dialogue between the conductor and ensemble. The afternoon highlights Kamilaroi percussionist and composer Adam Manning on clapsticks and auxiliary percussion, bringing rhythmic elements rooted in First Nations approaches and concepts into the composition. Adam Manning was the Australian Art Orchestra’s First Nations Artist in Residence in 2025. Manning is a musician, artist and researcher at the University of Newcastle, NSW. As an original Custodial Descendant of Kamilaroi Barray (Land), and a composer/percussionist and artist/designer, his rhythmic expression connects him to Land, People, Culture and Story and articulates the natural frequency (heartbeat) of Ngaya Barray (Mother Earth). His musical expertise has led him to share the stage with distinguished ensembles such as the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & the Australian Art Orchestra. His compositions have featured on ABC Classic, Ensemble Offspring, and the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

TarraWarra Live and our Composer in Residence program reflect the Australian Art Orchestra and TarraWarra Museum of Art’s shared commitment to commissioning new Australian work, enabling cross-pollination between visual arts and music.

The Australian Art Orchestra

The Australian Art Orchestra (AAO) is Australia’s premier creative music ensemble. Celebrating improvisation as a practice that connects us across borders of culture and art forms, AAO seeks to define a unified musical language – representative of the diversity of artists and artistic practice in Australia and across the Asia-Pacific. Through cross-cultural collaborations, interdisciplinary projects and works that explore new creative territories, AAO interrogates the spaces in between improvised and notated forms, finding new pathways of experimentation across musical languages, artistic disciplines and cultures. AAO celebrates the vibrant and contemporary culture of all Australians, and is a vehicle to explore shared and new traditions with our regional neighbours.