Biography

Born and bred in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Alison Isadora (1962) studied political philosophy and music at the Victoria University of Wellington before moving to the Netherlands in 1986 primarily to study violin with Vera Beths and thereafter to study composition with Gilius van Bergeijk and Theo Loevendie at The Hague Conservatorium (1994 with distinction).

She has been a performing composer or a composing performer within numerous groups in the Netherlands including Hex Ensemble, Gending, the Maarten Altena Ensemble, and her own group The Electric Aardvark. Her works have been performed in the Pacific, Europe and North America. In the last years she has become increasingly interested in the possibilities of connecting music to other disciplines, and in the ways realtime electronics can assist this process. Her first foray into this arena in 1995 was the music-theatre work Hoofdwas, for midi-controlled washing-machine, live electronics and mezzo-soprano which she created together with Jan-Bas Bollen (with whom she forms the duo SYNC).

Since 2002 Isadora has been working on a series of pieces concerned with issues of cultural identity. In 2003 she graduated from DasArts – an institute for post-graduate theatre studies with the work Speaking Rites premiered during the Gaudeamus Music Week – an installation and audio walk in which interviews with Dutch citizens from various cultural extraction were presented in an interactive environment.

In May 2004 her music-theatre work 6 1/2 hours commissioned by Gaudeamus was premiered in Amsterdam.

• Works (11)
• Awards (2)