Music Industry News

SOUNZ Centre for New Zealand Music Toi te Arapūoru, with APRA AMCOS Te Tautāwhinga, is delighted to announce the finalists for the 2025 SOUNZ Contemporary Award Te Tohu Auaha, celebrating excellence in contemporary composition:

Chris Gendall – Wow Signal
Dylan Lardelli – Drift Aspect
Ihlara McIndoe – of coral and foam
Flo Wilson – In The Stars

Four finalists have been selected this year – an increase from the usual three – highlighting the exceptional quality and depth of submissions received for the award. The finalists were selected by a judging panel of independent industry professionals, including international representative Robert Hasegawa (Canada), Associate Professor in Music Research at Montreal’s McGill University. On the difficult task of selecting this year’s finalists, Hasegawa noted:

“I was honoured to join the panel for the SOUNZ Contemporary Award as this year’s international member. The quality of the nominated works was excellent and represented a remarkably wide range of styles and genres. It was a challenge to make the choice of four finalists from this strong and varied field of submissions. Ultimately, though, through a spirited and thoughtful discussion among the panel members, we were able to settle on four particularly outstanding finalists. The diversity of aesthetic sensibilities and distinctive compositional voices among these entries is a tribute to the innovation and passion of New Zealand’s creative musical community.”

The panel, which included New Zealanders Penny Axtens, Justin DeHart, Samuel Holloway, and Ariana Tikao, commented on the extremely high quality of the submissions this year, with a wide range of styles represented among the 60 entries from 45 composers.

Chris Gendall
Wow Signal

Auckland-based composer Chris Gendall’s Wow Signal is a concerto for trombone and orchestra. The work was recorded at the 2024 New Zealand Composer Sessions with soloist David Bremner and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Hamish McKeich. Gendall teaches composition at the University of Auckland and his works regularly grace the programmes of ensembles in Aotearoa and abroad. In 2008 he won the SOUNZ Contemporary Award, and has since been named a finalist five times.

Dylan Lardelli
Drift Aspect

Dylan Lardelli’s work Drift Aspect was commissioned by German contemporary ensemble Ensemble Musikfabrik, and written for the unusual combination of cor anglais, bass clarinet, violin, viola, and double bass. Lardelli says about his work, “Drift Aspect seeks to move in the spaces that sound, namely music, inhabits in dreams. The indirect hints, and enigmatic shadows of sound events in dreams manoeuvre their way through the course of this work, coupled with the sonic translation of the struggle to reach for depleted memories and sensations found in dreams.” Both a guitarist and composer, Lardelli is active in both the creation and interpretation of contemporary music. He was previously named a finalist for the 2006 SOUNZ Contemporary Award.

Ihlara McIndoe
of coral and foam

Second-time finalist Ihlara McIndoe has been nominated for her work of coral and foam. The work blends a string quartet with live and pre-recorded vocalisations and includes extracts from texts by Katherine Mansfield. The work was performed and recorded by the Rhythm Method Quartet in New York City, where McIndoe is currently based. It explores ideas of embrace and rejection, drawing upon a collection of Mansfield’s poetry in which the sea takes on various complex, shifting characters. In McIndoe’s work, the tensions and instability inherent in the sea, and within the relationships it represents in Mansfield’s work, are a key focus.

Flo Wilson
In The Stars

Berlin-based composer and performer Flo Wilson receives their first finalist nomination for the SOUNZ Contemporary Award with In The Stars, a spatial audio site-specific work for choir and electronics. The work was conceived specifically for Silo Park in Auckland, and is an electroacoustic work performed with a choir – vocalists Anita Clark, Anna Fällt, Allana Goldsmith, Chelsea Prastiti, and Fergus Waveforms. Each silo is ‘activated’ by a speaker, turning the space into a kind of giant hybrid organ, which the audience can move through freely as if part of the instrument exploring the resonance of the space.

On the naming of finalists for this year’s award, SOUNZ Chief Executive, Hannah Darroch says:

“The SOUNZ Contemporary Award Te Tohu Auaha has been one of our flagship composer awards for many years, and it’s always a thrill to see which works appear as finalists from the extremely high-quality pool of applicants. It’s wonderful to see such a range of works this year, which is indicative of the incredible creative activity coming out of Aotearoa. We look forward to sharing these works with the wider public, and championing our corner of the music industry in the lead-up to the APRA Silver Scrolls in October.”

The winner of the SOUNZ Contemporary Award Te Tohu Auaha will be announced at the 2025 APRA Silver Scroll Awards Kaitito Kaiaka to be held at the Isaac Theatre Royal in Ōtautahi Christchurch on Wednesday 29 October.

The SOUNZ Contemporary Award Te Tohu Auaha recognises New Zealand compositions demonstrating outstanding levels of creativity and inspiration, and has been presented in collaboration with APRA AMCOS NZ since 1998.

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