Composers & WorksAaron Wyatt

Lux Aeterna
for trombone
Composed for Jeremy Mazurek
World premiere performance: 17 Jun 2024 at 2:00pm, Rosina Auditorium

Performed as part of ANAM 2024 Recitals
by Jeremy Mazurek (trombone)

This ANAM Set commission was generously supported by the Australian Government through Creative Australia and the Anthony and Sharon Lee Foundation


Program note:

Lux Aeterna is at its core an exploration of timbre and the interplay that occurs between the notes of a slightly imperfect harmonic series. The solo trombone starts with a simple, low drone before slowly creeping upwards through its range. As it does so, the sound of the instrument is sampled, and a series of loops are built up to form a choir of brass. Slowly, one by one, the sound of these ghost trombones is filtered down, leaving only pure sine tones. This slow timbral shift creates a shimmering soundscape where instrument and electronics sometimes blend and sometimes collide.


About the composer:

Aaron Wyatt (he/they) is an accomplished violist, conductor, composer, programmer and academic. Currently an assistant lecturer at Monash University, he has played in a wide variety of ensembles across many different genres. They are a long-term member of the award-winning Decibel New Music ensemble. As well as performing with the ensemble, he is the developer behind the Decibel ScorePlayer app, the group’s cutting-edge, animated graphic notation software for the iPad.

An emerging conductor, he was nominated for a Helpmann Award for his role as musical director of the premiere season of Cat Hope’s opera, Speechless, and is the director of Ensemble Dutala, Australia’s First Nations chamber ensemble. An advocate for Indigenous classical music and musicians, he premiered Deborah Cheetham Fraillon’s work, Nanyubak, for viola and orchestra as a soloist with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. During a conducting engagement with the MSO, he became the first Indigenous Australian to conduct one of the state symphony orchestras in concert. He has since gone on to work with the Adelaide Symphony and Sydney Symphony Orchestras and conducted the premiere of the first opera in Noongar language - Gina Williams’ and Guy Ghouse’s Koolbardi Wer Wardong, with the West Australian Opera.

As a composer, he has participated in the Ngarra-Burria First Peoples composer program, writing for Ensemble Ospring. He has also written several electro-acoustic works, using a mix of traditional and animated graphic notation for Decibel, GreyWing Ensemble, Ensemble Dutala, and for Kyla Matsuura-miller’s Freedman Fellowship project, Three Conversations.

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