Composer, violist and conductor Aaron Wyatt has been named as the recipient of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ 2026 John Mulvaney Fellowship.

The Noongar musician will travel to New Norcia in Western Australia to access a collection of Indigenous musical materials held by the town’s monastery. In collaboration with the local community, Wyatt will use these to develop a major new composition to be premiered in 2027.

Aaron Wyatt. Photo © Jessica Bader Photography

“The composition I develop in New Norcia will feature field recordings from the site and incorporate Indigenous musical themes first transcribed and arranged in the 19th century by Rosendo Salvado, a Benedictine monk who founded the monastery,” said Aaron. “Their reclamation and recontextualisation will invite listeners to contemplate the way in which traditional Indigenous music has often been reshaped for its inclusion in more rigid, Western forms.”

Wyatt’s works have been performed by the Canberra, Melbourne and West Australian symphony orchestras, the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, the Australian Music Centre, Ensemble Offspring, among others. He is a member of Decibel New Music, and developed the Decibel ScorePlayer, an iPad app which allows for the playback of graphic scores. In 2021, he became the first Indigenous Australian to conduct a state symphony orchestra.

Wyatt’s current practice centres around electroacoustic compositions, in which he uses acoustic performances, field recordings and electronic processing to unpack history behind objects; for the 2026 Canberra Internationa Music Festival, he was invited to reinterperet Eugene Ughetti’s spatial work Bell Curve, which uses the Federation Handbells as instruments.

Aaron Wyatt and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in the MSO’s First Voices Showcase 2026. Photo © Laura Manariti

“Music can be a powerful avenue for truth telling and, my hope is this project can help to lead to greater diversity in our art music scene, ensuring that it better reflects and represents who we are as a nation,” said Wyatt.

The John Mulvaney Fellowship supports Aboriginal and Torres Strait early-career researchers and PhD students, awarding up to $4,000 to undertake research or fieldwork in the humanities,.

“Aaron Wyatt is an exceptional composer, conductor and researcher whose work demonstrates how the humanities and the creative arts can deepen our understanding of Australia’s history while creating new cultural possibilities for the future,” said Professor Professor Stephen Garton, President of the Academy.

“Through the John Mulvaney Fellowship, Aaron will reclaim and recontextualise remarkable Indigenous musical materials, bringing them into conversation with contemporary audiences. The Academy is proud to support this important project, which reflects the Fellowship’s purpose of advancing outstanding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander humanities research and enriching Australia’s cultural life.”

More information about the John Mulvaney Fellowship can be found here.