Composer

Biography

Louise Webster was born in Auckland and grew up in Napier and Wellington. She studied medicine in Auckland, but took a year off to study piano performance with Judith Clark at Victoria University before returning to the University of Auckland to complete her MBChB and study with Janetta McStay. In 2003 Louise returned to university to study composition part-time with Eve de Castro Robinson, John Elmsly, and Leonie Holmes at the University of Auckland, and is just completing her MMus. During this time she was awarded a first place in the Douglas Lilburn Trust Composition Prize in 2005 and 2008, the 2011 Douglas Mews Choral Composition Prize, and the Llewelyn Jones Prize in Music for Piano 2011.
Louise is the recipient of the 2012 CANZ Trust Fund Award.

Louise has a dual career in music and medicine, working as a child psychiatrist and paediatrician at Starship Children’s Hospital and the School of Medicine, and as a composer. She continues to play piano chamber music with friends and colleagues and to play the violin in St. Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra.

Louise has written works for a range of instrumental combinations including solo violin, piano, chamber ensembles, voice, and orchestra. Her orchestral works have been performed by St Matthew’s Chamber Orchestra in 2006, 2008 and 2010, the Wellington Chamber Orchestra in 2010, and the Westlake Chamber Orchestra in 2008. Her clarinet quintet ‘An infinite shore’ was performed by the Karlheinz Company in 2011. A short piano piece was included in the 2010 Sunrise Music Trust publication ‘Take Flight’.

Louise’s compositions draw creative ideas from a variety of sources, including the sounds and images of the New Zealand landscape, poetry and words, and the issues she confronts in her day-to-day clinical work. “I enjoy the creative challenge of writing for specific instrumental combinations, performers, and audiences. Music is essentially about communication; as a composer I try to hold the performer and the audience in mind and integral to the creative process”