Performer to Composer: Ronan Apcar chats with Georgina Bowden
6 November, 2025
Georgina Bowden is a composer, visual artist and multidisciplinary creator living in Adelaide, South Australia. Her music has been performed across Europe and Australia, recently in the ASO’s multimedia concert at the Light Room Adelaide, Ensemble Musikfabrik’s studio in Cologne, Hannover New Music’s Zeitlupe series, and Ostrava Days Festival in Czechia. Georgina transforms concepts from sciences, arts and politics into visceral music. These may be spatial and sensory experiences, drawing on her architecture training. This year she is also writing for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Cybec program.
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! Ronan interviewed Georgina about her musical background, interests and current projects.
Georgina Bowden, 2025 Hatched Academy Composer
Ronan Apcar, 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer
Ronan: Do you have any formative experiences or early memories that you think shaped you into the composer/artist you are today?
Georgina: I’m very grateful for training in architecture. It was formative to my thinking, and opened my mind to artistic depth and broader purpose of any creative work. Consequently I believe it’s important to take time to figure out concepts I want to explore in sound and consider how they’d work before getting stuck into the composition process.
Ronan: 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?
Georgina: With the type of music I write, I’m very keen to work with Elision ensemble of course - I think our creative approaches are complimentary. I’d also love to collaborate with people making new types of art form, like Punchdrunk (immersive theatre in London), and 1781 collective (experimental musical art performances in Berlin). I’m also keen to be part of Adelaide’s Illuminate festival with my mini glow-in-the-dark opera.
Ronan: If you had to pick another artform or creative practice besides music, what would it be?
Georgina: I have been an artist longer than a musician. Drawing is actually my default expressive medium - but I do come from a family of architects so that’s not surprising…
Ronan: Performers often have some kind of ritual before they go on stage - do you have any rituals for when it’s time to compose?
Georgina: I walk along the Torrens river… being in nature gets my mind happy and curious. And there are always some laughs to be had from the silly parrots.
Ronan: What’s one of your most favourite sounds in the world - and one of your least favourites?
Georgina: Are you referring to that Stockhausen interview? I love that clip and he makes a good point!
Ronan: What’s a recent composition or project you’re proud of and would like to share?
Georgina: I had a very special experience working with Musikfabrik. I wrote a piece translating my experience of Uluru into sound - not literally, but the sense of a great mass, the form and negative space - and asking the musicians to be vulnerable and try challenging things. They truly took to it to the next level, and every performance I watched with my jaw on the floor - I admire them so much.
Ronan: Tell us a bit about your composition to be premiered at Future Classics!
Georgina: Sometimes pieces end up being similar to how you first imagined them, and sometimes you have processes like this one for me, where it takes some unexpected turns and arrives at a different place! Starting off as a play with ‘acoustic depth’ - ie dry sounds against sustained or reverb - the piece has actually turned into a game-like graphic score exploring ideas of magnetism and imitation, where the actual score itself looks a bit like the southern lights (which is a visualisation of earth’s magnetic field). It still plays with ideas of vastness and depth in sound, but the critical elements are interactions of the routes in the game and choices that the performers make in relation to one another.
Ensemble Offspring’s 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer, pianist Ronan Apcar.
Georgina’s new work, composed through our Hatched Academy Composers program, will premiere on 22 November 2025 at the Uzton Room, Sydney Opera House, performed by Ensemble Offspring as part of Future Classics.
