Sundays at Noon : Bianca Gannon – piano and percussion

Described by JOLT as “redefining the idiom”, Bianca Gannon is an Irish interdisciplinary art music composer and improvisor. Weaving together her extensive training in composition, improvised music, piano and Indonesian percussion, her works are often immersive, multi-sensory, and investigative with social commentary. Passionately exploring parallels between seemingly disparate concepts, Bianca is inspired by that which connects us.

Bianca’s free improvisations and instant-compositions traverse time, form and genre. The other-worldly extended harmonies and tunings of solo simultaneous piano + gamelan + singing bowls create an ethereal lyricism layered with meditative pulsating difference tones. Unique timbres, ritualistic rhythms, jazz and post-classical references resonate in an expansive timelessness. Bianca has toured this solo work across Australia, Europe and North America and has been selected by Improvised Music Company as a 30/30 Artist – one of Ireland’s outstanding Improvisors. JOLT have described her as “one of Australia’s rising jazz stars” and Australianjazz.net as “breaking barriers”.

BAN BAM Awardee (Composition), Pythia Prize Winner (Composition) and 2020 Artist in Residence with the City of Greater Dandenong, Bianca’s work has been presented internationally by leading ensembles including loadbang, Ensemble Offspring, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Australian Art Orchestra, and the Irish National Concert Hall Gamelan with Elizabeth Hilliard. Bianca recently performed her Melbourne Symphony Orchestra commission ‘Utter Stutter Flutter’ for piano, orchestra, video, electronics and West Javanese angklung, at the Myer Music Bowl. With an audience of ten thousand, The Age described it as “soul-stirring” and the ABC as “extraordinary…a really special work”.

The premiere of her work ‘Our House Is On Fire’ by Rubiks Collective was awarded the 2021 Percy Grainger Award. ClassikON hailed it as “living up to the evenings luminary thread… A beautifully crafted and relevant work… its relevance possesses a need for dissemination into the canon.”

Bianca has lived in and studied music intensively across the Indonesian archipelago including as a recipient the Indonesian Arts and Culture Scholarship, as well as collaborating with internationally acclaimed Indonesian artists and with custodians of endangered Indonesian food-centric instruments on ‘The Sound of Shadows’ series.