Performer to Composer: Ronan Apcar chats with Louis Wishart
28 October, 2025
Louis Wishart is a Sydney-based Composer and Musician, whose sound synthesises free-improvisation aesthetics with a focus on resonance, spectralism, and linear processes. Louis has had his music performed internationally, in Houston with the AURA ensemble, Ensemble Garage in Cologne and Ostrava, as well as a recent Czech premiere by Ostravska Banda in August, where Louis returned to the Ostrava Days festival. Louis focuses his time towards his ensemble "Scalp", which debuted in January and July 2025, premiering a new work by Louis, as well as his arrangement of the punk operetta "John Gavanti".
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 Louis about his musical background, interests and current projects.
Louis Wishart, 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?
Louis: The first time I ever presented music I’d written to actual musicians was really influential on my path towards focusing on composition. I played in a jazz quintet in early high school at a time when I’d been listening to a lot of Roy Hargrove and playing a lot of piano. So I wrote a piece inspired by his music and presented it to my bandmates, and it was the moment I heard these musicians that I respected so much bring their own life and individuality to something I just came up with at the piano that changed everything for me. I’d say afterwards discovering the music of Charles Mingus set me up to start really playing around with structure in Jazz Composition and Large Jazz Ensembles, which I’d say led a direct route to the composers I love the most today; Anthony Braxton, Witold Lutoslawski, Pauline Oliveros, Peter Ablinger, Maryanne Amacher, Gyorgy Kurtag, Morton Feldman, Charles Ives, Annesley Black and Lisa Streich.
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?
Louis: One of my biggest idols has always been Scott Walker. His late albums Tilt, The Drift and Bish Bosch have been an immeasurable influence on my composition, the structures and the poetics of my music so I think the opportunity to have been an orchestrator or arranger on one of his projects would have been an absolute dream.
Ronan: If you had to pick another artform or creative practice besides music, what would it be?
Louis: During High School I almost made the switch completely from music to filmmaking so I’d have to say filmmaking. The main reason I abandoned filmmaking is because it was getting more and more difficult to convince my friends to work on my films all the time, and it was at a similar time that I started composing so I guess in a sense it was just a continuation of what I was already doing. I do quite a bit of film scoring, and I see myself possibly returning to filmmaking in the future, but music will always be the centre of everything.
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?
Louis: I don’t know if I have much of a pre-composing ritual. I’d say I always have a pot of tea when composing which I feel like is a psychological trick I use to get me settled in my space to compose and explore. I’ll also often listen to a new piece of music I haven’t heard before getting started, but other than that I keep it pretty simple.
Ronan: What’s one of your most favourite sounds in the world - and one of your least favourites?
Louis: I get a lot of a comfort from busy sounds, like the rustling of grass or a strong wind making it’s way through a thick forest, or the distant sound of lots of people talking. I also get comfort from gentle humming sounds, like the subtle tones in a fan or a train passing by in the middle of the night. In terms of my least favourite sounds, I’ve lived with misophonia for most of my life so eating sounds usually does the trick.
Ronan: What’s a recent composition or project you’re proud of and would like to share?
Louis: My new quartet will be debuting on the 25th of November at Jetsets at Rockdale. We will be playing a set of new compositions by myself, focusing on concepts used frequently in my concert music drawn from my transcriptions and studies of open improvisations. Featuring myself on Trumpet and Piano, the band is a stellar line up of Sydney’s best musicians: Sam Killick on Guitar; Henry Hall on Double Bass; and Hayley Chan on drums. Also, as my ensemble “Scalp” prepares for our 2026 season, you can follow us on Instagram @scalpensemble as we post clips from our debut concert from July, as well as receive updates and announcements for future concerts.
Ronan: Tell us a bit about your composition to be premiered at Future Classics!
Louis: The work that I have written for Future Classics is called Children of Aurora. The impetus for the work came from an excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” and Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”, resulting in an exploration of flatness and vanishing points. McCarthy’s description of the transcendent flatness of prairie landscapes was hypnotic in it’s primordial representation of 19th Century America, post US-Mexico War. This coalesced when reading of Thoreau’s emphasis on simplicity and returning to a collective consciousness and cyclical existence within nature, namely in his allusion to the Colossi of Memnon, two large stone sculptures in Egypt depicting Pharaoh Amenhotep III. Following an Earthquake partially damaging the stones, records report the colossi emitting a fragile whistling cry at Dawn, likely due to the evaporation of dew in the porous rock. Thus, it was given the nickname Memnon, being the son of Aurora, the goddess of the Dawn. To quote Thoreau, “All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning… Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me”. This became the catalyst for an exploration of sonic vanishing points, using the topography of mountain ranges to generate rhythms for the piano clusters, between which sits the ensemble representing the transcendent flatness, the horizon which gets further away the more you approach. Using the piano in its extreme registers as a generator for spectral material for the ensemble to render elevation, the piece positions stark simplicity against intense polyphonic detail as two representations of the same transcendent flatness, with the larger structural process applied to register and timbre merging these two perspectives into broader vanishing points of intra and extra-musical meaning, to form one image.
Ensemble Offspring’s 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer, pianist Ronan Apcar.
Louis’ new work Children of Aurora, 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.
