Limelight's Novel 100 playlist: 76-100

Guide to Australian Art Music

In partnership with Cameron Lam, Limelight invited readers to use its Guide to Australian Art Music to explore, listen and vote for their ten favourite tracks of Australian art music. Here’s your picks, shown in alphabetical order.

The votes are in – listen to the results!

(revealed 19 Nov!)

(revealed 17 Nov!)

(revealed 13 Nov!)

Tracklist

Isobel Archer
To a Butterfly
Performed by Isobel Archer

Tom Avgenicos
Iron Chef
Performed by Tom Avgenicos & Delay 45

Shannon Barnett
rich
Performed by Shannon Barnett Quartet

Kristin Berardi
He Was a Loaded Gun
Performed by Kristin Berardi, Miro Sprague, Marty Jaffe & Jerome Jennings

Leah Blankendaal
Lake III: The Northerly Blew
Performed by Luminescence Chamber Singers & Roland Peelman

James Boyd-Hoare
Resonance
Performed by Elizabeth Ferris

Alanya Bridge
That Night
Performed by Beda Spindola, Kimberly Durflinger, Jean-Philippe de Passos, Nikos Mavridis, Maria Grig, Daniel Chouinard, Bruno Migliari, Jeremy Lappitt, Gabor Udvarhelyi, Horacio París, João Paulo Drumond & Alanya Bridge

Anne Cawrse
Anniversary Trio Movement 1: Exuberant
Performed by Lyrebird Trio

Tristan Coelho
read/write error
Performed by Ensemble Offspring

Robert Davidson
Three Moods: I. Sunlight on the Swan River
Performed by Perth Guitar Quartet

Ross Edwards
The Dance of Life from Bird Spirit Dreaming
Performed by Diana Doherty, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra & Arvo Volmer

Lydia Gardiner
The Town of Wind
Performed by Perth Guitar Quartet

David Joseph
Dialogues
Performed by Ripieno Kammerorchester Winterthur (Switz), Urs Walker & Howard Griffiths

Rafael Karlen
The River Above
Performed by The Australian Voices, Camerata- Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra, Rafael Karlen & John Rotar

Andrea Keller
I Wish We Were…
Performed by Stephen Magnusson, Andrea Keller, Sam Anning & Kyrie Anderson

Domenic Lamattina
Perth City Skylines
Performed by WAAPA Symphony Orchestra & Jessica Gethin

Stephen Leek
The Black Swan
Performed by The Australian Voices & Stephen Leek

Liza Lim
A Sutured World: III. Sutra – Live
Performed by Nicolas Altstaedt, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks & Edward Gardner

Ella Macens
The Space Between Stars
Performed by Sydney Symphony Orchestra & Jessica Cottis

Robert McIntyre
Time, a passage
Performed by Georgina Lewis

Jim Ottaway
Celestial Voyager
Performed by Jim Ottaway

Melany Thompson
Painting Waves
Performed by Melany Thompson

Raul Torres Jr.
Poems & Riddles In, Pt 1
Performed by Raul Torres Jr.

Felix Wallis
Birdsong
Performed by Felix Wallis, Abby Constable, Sabine Tapia, Harley Coleman, Youssef Sawires & Lydia Sawires

Nigel Westlake
Songs From the Forest
Performed by Slava & Leonard Grigoryan

Featured composers

Isobel Archer

Isobel Archer is a pianist and composer from Sydney, and currently works with Opera Australia as the Young Artist Répétiteur for 2026-27. Isobel’s main compositional influence is the natural landscape she grew up around in Queensland. Her debut CD, Solaris, features original piano pieces that reflect on themes of nostalgia and natural beauty.

Tom Avgenicos

Tom Avgenicos is a trumpeter, composer and producer based in Newcastle/Muloobinba. His practice unfolds across jazz & improvised music, contemporary music and interdisciplinary collaboration, often engaging with improvised dance, multimedia and site-responsive contexts. He has released eight albums as a leader or co-leader and is a recipient of the Freedman Jazz Fellowship, Best in Music and Best in Dance at the 2024 Sydney Fringe Festival, and a 2025 & 2026 APRA Art Music Award nomination.

Shannon Barnett

Shannon Barnett is a trombonist and composer based in Cologne, Germany.

Kristin Berardi

Kristin Berardi is a Queensland-born, Switzerland-based creative musician, composer and educator and is passionate about sharing music. She was one of Australia’s first calls in jazz performance and education, but looks forward to connecting with a wider audience now she is based in Europe. She also works in the contemporary music field outside jazz and into the experimental field.

Leah Blankendaal

Leah Blankendaal is an award-winning musician whose language is “kind, immersive and thoughtful,” and offers “us space to breathe and to be.” At home as a composer and performer, Blankendaal’s composition spans orchestral, chamber and vocal music, as well as electro-acoustic improvisation and installation art. She has received the ABC Classic Commissioning Fund, APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund, Peggy Glanville Hicks Commission, the Australian Music Centre Classical: Next Fellowship, and the 2025 AMC Momentum Plus Orchestral Initiative.

James Boyd-Hoare

boyd is a Sydney-born composer, pianist and sound artist creating emotionally driven music that blends acoustic instruments with a deep electronic sound. His work spans artist releases, live electronic performances and screen, with credits across film, television and immersive projects. boyd writes music for the feelings we can’t quite describe, drawing listeners into intimate and cinematic sound worlds.

Alanya Bridge

Alanya Bridge is an award-winning Australian composer and lyricist whose work has been performed in New York, London and Australia. Her work spans musical theatre and contemporary classical music.

Anne Cawrse

Composer Anne Cawrse is inspired by stories, art, nuance, and the fragility of the human condition. Her artistic practice is built around connection between the composer, the performer and the audience, and a belief that music has the power to express the inexpressible. Based in Adelaide, she composes for orchestral, band, choral, and chamber groups, as well as solo instruments and voice.

Tristan Coelho

Tristan Coelho is an Australian composer whose music is inspired by the natural environment and our digital, data-driven world. Project highlights include his recent Harp Concerto, premiered by Emily Granger and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and Hokusai Mixtape, winner of the 2022 APRA/AMCOS Art Music Award for Work of the Year: Chamber Music.

Robert Davidson

Robert Davidson is a prolific composer, bassist, lecturer, and founder and artistic director of Topology, whose music is widely performed, recorded and broadcast internationally. He studied composition with Terry Riley, South Indian vocal music in Kerala, and completed a PhD in composition at the University of Queensland, and has worked with all of Australia’s professional orchestras and many leading artists.

Ross Edwards

Born in 1943, Australian composer, Ross Edwards, divides his time between Sydney and the World Heritage-listed Blue Mountains National Park with his wife/manager, Helen and 2 adult children, Jeremy and Emily. Ross has written for all forms of music and is hugely influenced by the sounds of Nature and birdsong which inspire his quirky rhythms and contrasting moods.

Lydia Gardiner

Lydia Gardiner is a composer and singer from Perth, currently based in The Hague (The Netherlands). Her work focuses on developing a harmonic language that uses tonality in a novel and distinctive way, combined with careful manipulation of timbre to evoke image to create a communicative link between herself, the performer, and the listener.

David Joseph

Born in Melbourne in 1954, David Joseph has written extensively for orchestras and ensembles in Australia and elsewhere. He is currently practicing as a lawyer in rural Victoria.

Rafael Karlen

Rafael Karlen is a composer and saxophonist whose music explores the spaces between jazz, improvisation, and contemporary art music. Currently based in Switzerland, his recent work continues to explore collaboration, openness, and the creative possibilities that emerge between composition, improvisation and performance.

Andrea Keller

Andrea Keller is an improvising pianist, band leader and composer based in Melbourne, Australia. For over two decades she has been creating contemporary jazz and improvised music, with twenty-five albums as leader. She is Associate Professor and Head of Jazz & Improvisation at the University of Melbourne, and runs the Gender Defying Jazz workshop series.

Domenic Lamattina

Domenic Lamattina is an emerging composer of contemporary classical music from Perth, Western Australia. With an extensive performance background in percussion, his compositions for wind ensemble, symphony orchestra and percussion ensemble have been performed all over Perth.

Stephen Leek

Stephen Leek is a composer, conductor and educator who has been writing music for over 40 years especially for choirs, children, youth, dance and for use in music education. With numerus international and national awards, he has been described as the “founder of Australian choral music” with his music performed and appreciated across the globe. His compositions capture the essence of the Australian landscape in a fresh, accessible and approachable manner.

Liza Lim

Liza Lim is an Australian composer, educator, and researcher whose music thinks with ritual, material agency, and environmental philosophy across the cultural lands of a more‑than‑human world. Her practice articulates relations rather than objects, braiding beauty and rage with female spiritual lineages into emergent ecologies of sound. In 2026, Lim received the Grawemeyer Award for her cello concerto A Sutured World, as well as the Mauricio Kagel Musikpreis, affirming her place as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary music.

Ella Macens

Ella Macens is rapidly claiming her place as one of Australia’s most distinctive and celebrated contemporary classical composers. Drawing upon the lyricism of her Latvian heritage, her affinity with singer-songwriter practice, and a command of contemporary classical composition, she has developed a unique artistic practice grounded in intimacy and authenticity. Frequently commissioned by leading orchestras and ensembles, her work is praised for its warmth, clarity and emotional immediacy, earning her growing recognition both nationally and internationally.

Robert McIntyre

Drawing on climate, important causes, society and the personal, Robert McIntyre is an award-winning Australian composer whose music designs newfound space for moments to achieve them a multi-faceted sense of visibility. Described as “strikingly contemporary” (Limelight), McIntyre works with the likes of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Flinders Quartet, Omega Ensemble, Tasmania Symphony Orchestra and more locally and internationally, and represented Australia at 2025 ISCM World New Music Days in Portugal.

Jim Ottaway

Jim Ottaway is an international award-winning composer and musician based on the Gold Coast. Specialising in ambient and electronic music, Jim’s work is influenced by artists such as Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. Jim is the first Australian to be nominated for, and to win, a Schallwelle German Electronic Music Award.

Melany Thompson

Melany Thompson is an Australian pianist and composer whose emotive contemporary classical music has been released internationally through a range of independent labels. Her solo piano music has amassed more than 14 million streams worldwide, alongside her composition work across television and production music. An APRA-nominated screen composer, Melany continues to develop her distinctive musical voice and expand her creative practice across contemporary classical and screen composition.

Raul Torres Jr.

For nearly 18 years Raul has worked as a composer, producer and conductor on various projects for film, TV, theatre and games. His work can be heard on various TV series on the National Geographic Channel, SBS Australia as well as various live performances across Australia and the USA.

Felix Wallis

Growing up, Felix played double bass and piano in orchestras and jazz ensembles. He studied composition at Sydney Conservatorium before starting a career in music production, composition and orchestration. His original work spans music for the concert hall (including works written for Omega Ensemble and Australia Ensemble), records incorporating electronics and live instrumentation (Miniflora and Glowtonic) and soundtracks.

Nigel Westlake

Nigel began composing in 1980, working across radio, theatre, circus, television and film. His compositions have earned numerous accolades including two ARIA Awards, seven ARIA nominations, 15 APRA awards, the 2022 APRA Distinguished Services to the Australian Screen Award, the Gold Medal for Best Original Music at the New York International Radio Festival, the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award and the Paul Lowin Orchestral Prize (in 2013 and 2019).