Wally Gunn
Wally Gunn is a composer who makes use of patterns and processes in his work, and sometimes utilizes speech, gesture, and movement to heighten the theatricality of musical performance, all with the aim of creating music that is expressive and affecting. The extramusical themes in his work look outward to explore the natural world, and inward to reflect queer identity and experience.
Hailing from a rural town in Australia’s southeast, Wally first began making music in his early teens, writing on a Casiotone keyboard for his electronic dance band, which never played a gig. After high school, he moved to Melbourne to join rock bands, and spent several years writing songs, recording albums, and performing shows around the country.
In 2002, Wally enrolled in the Victorian College of the Arts composition program, where he collaborated with students from the Film & Television, Art, and Dance Schools, and as a result of several collaborations with the Drama School, he developed an interest in composing for experimental theater. After graduating with honors, he worked with his friends and fellow composers Kate Neal and Biddy Connor in the new music organization Dead Horse Productions to stage concerts of their own and other composers’ music in unusual spaces around Melbourne. Wally wrote concert music for several Australian ensembles, including Atticus String Quartet, The Dead Horse Ensemble, Silo String Quartet, Speak Percussion, and Three Shades Black, and from 2005 – 2008 he also wrote original scores for a number of Melbourne theatre companies.
Wally moved to New York in 2008 to begin a masters degree in composition at the Manhattan School of Music where he studied with Julia Wolfe, and he began writing concert music for US ensembles such as Dither Guitar Quartet, Ensemble Mise-En, Escher String Quartet, futureCities, Mobius Percussion, Red Shift, Roomful of Teeth, and Sō Percussion. His music has been performed at many US festivals, including Bang On A Can Summer Festival in MA, Carlsbad Music Festival in CA, and River To River Festival in NY. Maintaining his keen interest in theater, Wally composed original music for Manhattan-based The Actors Company Theatre.
In 2011, Wally began pursuing a PhD in composition at Princeton University, NJ, studying mostly with Steven Mackey and Daniel Trueman. In his first summer there, he participated in the Sō Percussion Summer Institute (SōSI), and the experience led Wally to write more percussion music, much of which includes gesture, speech, and other theatrical elements. Several of his percussion pieces have been featured at SōSI 2012 – 2015, at Neif Norf Summer Festival 2014, at TorQ Percussion Seminar 2015 in Canada, and most recently at the Percussive Arts Society International Conference (PASIC) 2015.
A collaboration in 2012 with vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth and Melbourne poet Maria Zajkowski yielded three songs entitled ‘The Ascendant’ that the ensemble recorded and released on their album ‘Render,’ for which they received a Grammy nomination in 2015. The success of the collaboration prompted the commissioning of three more songs completed in 2016, and New Amsterdam Records released Roomful of Teeth’s recording of the six songs together in August 2020.
As part of Princeton Sound Kitchen’s initiative The Black Box Project in 2013 and 2014, Wally devised new work with Brooklyn-based experimental theater company Nothing To See Here, under the artistic direction of Laura Sheedy. He went on to become a company member in 2014, and together they created the piece ‘Long Distance’ in collaboration with Melbourne writer Scott Brennan.
Wally is the founder of a collective called Biome Project which is a long-term collaboration between artists from many different disciplines working together to create a multimedia portrait-of-place in unique natural environments all over the planet. Biome Project’s first excursion to collect and develop material was in August 2013, when the artists spent a week at Nanya Research Station in the South Western corner of New South Wales, Australia. This venture continues as a work in progress.
In recent years, Wally has received commissions from Brooklyn Youth Chorus, percussionist Becca Doughty, Gemini Duo, The Letter String Quartet (AU), the New Works For Percussion Project, Roomful of Teeth, Rubiks Collective, percussionist Eric Shuster, guitarist Laura Snowden (UK), Steady State, Tala Rasa, Three (AU), and percussionist Jason Treuting.
Wally’s 2019 work ‘Moonlite,’ is a 90-minute oratorio for voices, percussion, and viola, with libretto by longtime collaborator Maria Zajkowski. The work is based on the true story of the queer 19th-century Australian outlaw Captain Moonlite, and is set in countryside close to the rural Australian town of Wally’s origin. The work was premiered in Philadelphia, PA, New York, NY, and Princeton, NJ, in May 2019 by Variant 6, Mobius Percussion, and Veronica Jurkiewicz. In November 2019, Wally received the Albert H Maggs Composition Award for the work.
Wally and Maria’s most recent collaboration, ‘I heart Artemis,’ was commissioned by the Maggs Award and was completed in 2021. It is a 60-minute oratorio for 6 voices that imagines a love affair between the mythological goddesses Athena and Artemis, set against the very real crisis of climate change. The piece will premiere in Philadelphia, PA, in March 2022, and in Melbourne, Australia, in September 2022.
Current projects include a commission for a concert-length song cycle for Melbourne chamber ensemble Rubiks Collective with acclaimed jazz vocalist Gian Slater, and a commission for a solo percussion piece for longtime collaborator from Salisbury, MD, Eric Shuster.
Wally currently divides his time between USA and Australia.
