Marguerite Boland

Marguerite Boland is a composer and writer. Her compositions take their impetus from encounters with people and places. She writes music in response to the moment, and to the extraordinary skill and creativity of the performers she comes into contact with. Her musical style draws on influences from modernism, soundscapes and early music.

Her most recent composition Can These Bones Live?  is a large song-cycle, setting poems by Gwen Harwood for narrator, soprano and mixed ensemble which she composed thanks to an Australia Council for the Arts Award. Other pieces include In De Wind for Niels Bijl’s Axes Quartet with the Astra Choir; Ave Maria! (a capella choir) for International Women’s Day at the Good Shepherd Chapel; pieces for Convent recorder maker Joanne Sauders; Ètudes Mallalieu  for MSO clarinettist Craig Hill. Pianists Michael Kieran Harvey and Edward Neeman have championed her Two Miniatures  for solo piano in Australia and New York, including on Harvey’s Move Records CD Astra 60. Electroacoustic pieces include Soundscape with Magpies  for an NGV Design Week exhibition at St. Heliers Street Gallery; and Childplay  for the Australasian Computer Music Society’s 60×60 Melbourne CD.

Marguerite has written on the music of Elliott Carter and of ultramoderinst Johanna Beyer (1888-1944), most recently on Beyer’s String Quartet No. 2 in Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers (Oxford University Press). With John Link, she edited the book Elliott Carter Studies (Cambridge University Press), and she co-edits the journal Elliott Carter Studies Online with John Link and Guy Capuzzo.