Touring around Australia this September, Paul Nicolaou’s multi-sensory, all-Australian program Elemental Resonance aims to immerse audiences in a solo harp performance evoking earth, wind, fire and air. 

Speaking to Limelight, the Australian harpist and composer admits that the four elements were the first thing that came to mind, “because they’re very represented in music”.

Paul Nicolaou performing Elemental Resonance at the 2025 Orange Chamber Music Festival. Photo © Peter Hislop

“They’re extremely relatable for audiences. Audiences of any age and any background know what earth, air, fire, and water are, and how they work and how they differ.”

“There’s also a lot of opportunity in there to have different multi-sensory elements. So, my first task was thinking up a program that could kind of divide into those four elements, and then after that thinking about how I could maybe pair some of those pieces or some of the musical experiences with other sensory experiences.”

With two of his own pieces and two improvisations, Nicolaou engages the senses. His piece Pythia, Oracle of Delphi, explores scent and music with the ancient rituals of the Temple of Apollo’s Pythia in mind: lit by an eternal flame, the high priestess would channel the god and deliver a prophecy as a fragrant, sweet-smelling vapour rose from the floor.

“All mysticisms aside, it’s now pretty widely accepted that it was probably just ethylene, and she was probably just high,” laughs Nicolaou.

Emulating this mysterious ritual, Nicolaou places diffusers around the harp and activates them as he plays.

“That way, there’s this visual element of this mist that’s surrounding the harp,” Nicolaou explains.

Paul Nicolaou’s first performance of Elemental Rsonance at the 2025 Orange Chamber Music Festival. Photo © Peter Hislop

Originally commissioned by the Orange Chamber Music Festival, Nicolaou has tinkered with the repertoire to platform Australian works, changing it from “about 65 percent Australian” to all Aussie works. 

“Championing Australian composers is only going to do good. They get performances, they obviously get royalties – albeit very small – but there’s a support element there, personally.”

Elemental Resonance is designed to showcase works by a number of Australian composers including Nigel Westlake, Christopher Larkin, and Ross Edwards. 

“There’s also enrichment artistically and culturally, because if I’m programming a certain Australian composer who’s potentially not programmed all that often – say, a Queensland-based composer programmed a fair amount in Queensland, but not much elsewhere – I’d like to think that that’s bringing a small but genuine bit of cultural change into our artistic ecosystem.”

Paul Nicolaou. Photo supplied

Speaking on other new additions to the program, Nicolaou’s Improvisation upon Water involves an interactive element: he fills wine glasses with water, passes them around to audience members to make them sing, and then improvises on the unique chord that is created. Wisely, he’s “not game enough” to tote his own glassware from airport to airport, so he’ll borrow some from each venue for the performance.

“Each glass will be a different size and so will have different range and pitch and I don’t know what access I’m gonna have to liquid supplies; there’s a lot of unknowns,” says Nicolaou.  “It is quite literally an improvisation on water.”

When asking how one prepares for such a performance, Nicolaou says he has to put a “whole lot of trust and faith in my own practice and in my own vision.”

“It’s similarly a massive amount of trusting [that] my own harmonic instincts are strong enough to be able to create something that’s convincing and cohesive within however much time I decide to give myself. So it’s one of those things that Iwill be a little bit of trial and error, which is terrifying and also kind of fun.”

Nicolaou says there’s a trove of good Australian harp music out there, but there are not many solo harpists playing recitals.

“There are even fewer solo harpists doing recitals of new music and so the further down the pipeline you get, the less frequently this really great repertoire gets performed. A lot of it gets performed just once for the premiere and never again.”

Paul Nicolaou. Photo © Alastair Bett

Nicolaou uses Elemental Resonance as an opportunity to bring “really great repertoire to audiences that otherwise wouldn’t be played”. Accessibility was one of his major considerations, an area that he says is “often quite trivialised.”

“I wanted to make it a show where those people could freely feel like they were welcome,” he says.

“People that need that an accessible environment don’t have those needs for one hour a week. Those needs are constant and I think the same thing applies in the concert hall when we’re thinking about making accessible concerts. We really need to build these experiences from the ground up.”

He has carefully selected the venues across the tour with consideration for these needs.

“I went to a lot of venues in Melbourne looking for a venue that was suitable, and a lot of the venues only had stairs. For me, that was a deal-breaker.”

Nicolaou struggled when venues asked about his target audience. “The second that I give a value or I name a target audience, I’m immediately dictating that I’m not focusing on everyone else. And so the goal with this performance and with this experience is to create an experience where anyone can enjoy it,” he says.

“I hope that any audience member, regardless of where they’re coming from or what their needs are, or what they hope to get out of the performance, can just be in an environment where they felt welcome and they felt like it was worth their while.”

Paul Nicolaou’s Elemental Resonance tours to Bowral, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney and Gosford, 30 August – 19 September. More information can be found here.