Composer to Performer: Georgina Bowden chats with Ronan Apcar
11 November, 2025
After his time in Canberra and Melbourne, Ronan Apcar has returned to his hometown of Sydney to focus on various projects throughout 2025 including concert work, recording work, residencies, and collaborative work with other artists and organisations - plus being Ensemble Offspring’s 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer! His current main creative focus is about developing a performance practice that both incorporates electronic or digital musicmaking and is portable, and exploring all the possibilities of live performance that this opens up - especially different performance spaces.
Georgina Bowden, one of our 2025 Hatched Academy Composers, interviewed Ronan about his musical background, interests and current projects.
Ronan Apcar, 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer
Georgina Bowden, 2025 Hatched Academy Composer
Georgina: When did you first start playing piano and what made you stick with it?
Ronan: When I first got a Nintendo DS, probably about eight years old. One of the first games that came out for the DS were those “brain training” games by Dr Kawashima, and one part of that game was a piano player segment. I thought it was heaps of fun and I wanted to do it on the ‘real deal,’ so I started copying out the Nintendo songs (it was literally just note names with a line for how long it went for - extremely inaccurate) to play on the piano that my dad had in the house. My older sister was taught piano and had all these books on learning piano, so when it was time to graduate from the Nintendo DS, I just voraciously read through these books.
I’m not really sure why I kept going; I guess it was fun and I was good at it. It was about seven years before I took it seriously and actually practised, so for me it feels like I’ve just stumbled into this world.
Georgina: You seem to work across many musical genres - tell us about your favourite kinds of gigs to work on and why!
Ronan: Maybe this is a bit self-indulgent but it’s the gigs I get to curate, probably because they often end up traversing many genres. I think the reason I love putting two seemingly unrelated pieces next to each other is because I believe that they mutually dissolve each other’s prejudices or expectations. Like in a program I did last year, putting Black Country, New Road (a British alt-rock band) alongside Sarah Nemtsov (a pretty cutting-edge German contemporary composer) seemed to level out the playing field; people who might see BC,NR as vapid pop music or see Nemtsov as “hard-to-listen-to” seem to come with a more open mind and realise the two pieces are actually expressing the same thing. At the end of the day, isn’t all music - no matter the style - a form of human expression?
Georgina: You’re also a composer - tell us about what you’ve been composing lately.
Ronan: Yeah a big focus this year has been basically how to use electronics, mainly for two reasons: to move away from the piano and to expand my sonic palette. I did two residencies this year (one at Mount Wilson, one at Bundanon) and brought with me a Nord keyboard, a Digitakt II drum machine, some pedals and mics - and even an old piano accordion! - and just improvised, learning about how to achieve sounds I wanted and what my workflow looked like. It’s been a really steep learning curve.
The idea has been about developing a new performance practice with this setup, but it totally combines composition and improvisation as well. While it wasn’t my goal, I actually ended up with a 20-40 minute piece from each residency which are both somewhere between structured improvisations and notated compositions. Break(ing)down was inspired by unbelievable amounts of fungi I saw in Mt Wilson, and The clouds are gathered for the final storm is a response to the amazing shapeshifters that clouds can be.
Georgina: Which musician/s have you enjoyed working with recently?
Ronan: Heaps of people! I feel lucky to be surrounded by so many amazing artists. I’ll try to rattle them off…
My friends Maria Zhdanovich, Jack Overall, and Sola Hughes and I have been improvising together over the last couple years. In July we had a self-imposed intensive to try and create an improv EP…that was a really nourishing few days and I love how open we are to each other’s musicianship.
Back in August in my recording project with Ensemble Apex, conductor Sam Weller brought such a positive energy and created a warm, democratic rehearsal space. Maybe it sounds silly, but it was really honest musicmaking with good humour thrown in and I really admired him for that.
Also, Lotte Betts-Dean who invited me to collaborate on her Sydney Festival show. She brought a program that was totally up my alley (i.e., all over the place!) and she was a phenomenal artist and someone who really inspired me.
And of course, the EO crew… I’m finding that chances to play chamber music can be far and few for me, let alone new and contemporary chamber works, so it’s a privilege to get to work on this repertoire with musicians who are also just as into it.
Georgina: Do you have a dream collaboration? Maybe a performer you would love to write a piece for, or another artist (musical or not!) you’d love to collaborate with?
Ronan: I have no idea what it’d look like, but the choreographer Sharon Eyal. I saw her work SAABA and was so obsessed with everything about it - the everchanging yet somewhat cyclical choreography, the club-inspired aesthetic, and the quasi-house music score by Ori Lichtik. I’d love to make work in that space and I would love to work more with dancers. I’ve always said that if I wasn’t a musician, I’d hope to be a dancer instead.
Georgina: What’s an extramusical thing that inspires you?
Ronan: Two very cliché things: my environment and my feelings. I draw a lot on my own experiences to help put the work I’m making or playing in a real emotional context. And I also spend a lot of time outside and I reckon I’m pretty sensitive to my environment - I get very irritable very quickly when the weather’s crap or if I’m left in an uninspiring or ugly place for too long. Maybe my work is often not explicitly about my environments, but I think that being connected to a natural environment inspires and allows me to be the best musician I can be.
Ensemble Offspring’s 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer, pianist Ronan Apcar.
Ronan will be joining us at Future Classics at 3pm on 22 November 2025 to perform new works by the 2025 Hatched Academy cohort. Through our Emerging Performer Commission, Ronan has also commissioned UK-composer Thomas Meadowcroft to write a new solo for him, to be premiered at Future Classics.
