Contributor
Yvette Audain
Composer, Jazz Composer, Performer
Biography
Yvette Audain currently resides in her birth city of Auckland, New Zealand. She has also lived and worked as a composing musician in Whitianga, Wellington and Melbourne (Australia). Her music has been performed throughout Australasia as well as in Japan and the USA.
As a woodwind player Yvette has worked professionally in a variety of genres: classical (Auckland Chamber Orchestra), military band (the full-time Royal New Zealand Navy Band), Celtic-style originals (trio ‘Doris’), Gypsy (the Benka Boradovsky Bordello Band), and many more situations in between. She was long involved with Auckland composers' collective The Committee, and a strong performance interest of hers is early jazz.
Yvette enjoys a fruitful involvement with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO), for whom she has completed many arrangements and been an associate saxophonist. She has also had several original works performed by the APO, including Eulogy (in association with the 2011 Writers’ and Readers’ Festival) and Felix the Cat: The Magic Bag, a short cartoon soundtrack for the APO Wind Quintet. As a jazz clarinetist, Yvette has also led a small ensemble affiliated to APOPS, the APO education programme, performing to school audiences around the Auckland region. The APO even once involved her in hip-hop, through their outreach programme APO Remix the Orchestra.
March 2011 brought the well-attended Grooves Unspoken: Music by Yvette Audain, a self-curated programme consisting entirely of Yvette’s own music, at St Lukes Church, Remuera, Auckland. This was in proud association with the Auckland Fringe Festival, and was recorded for broadcast by Radio New Zealand Concert. Three years later the works constituting this programme were collectively released as Grooves Unspoken the album. In 2012 one of the tracks, saxophone quartet A Charleston Kick With Steel Caps, was included in the programme for Saxcess’s nationwide Chamber Music New Zealand tour.
Yvette continues to perform her own compositions at events such as the Surrey Hills Music Festival (Melbourne), and in 2013 completed Loop City for violin with loop pedals, multitracking and two spoken word poets. This was commissioned by Melbourne Symphony Orchestra violinist Sarah Curro, who has performed the work numerous times around Melbourne with poets Amanda Anastasi and Steve Smart and released it as an album that can be purchased here through SOUNZ.
In 2022 Yvette completed Wera, a commission for Masterton-based pianist Sharon Joy Vogan Cawston who recorded and released it as part of Suite Aotearoa, a CD compilation of landscape preludes by various New Zealand composers, through Atoll Records in 2023.
Yvette holds a Bachelor of Music in composition and clarinet from the University of Auckland, and a Bachelor of Music (First Class Honours) in composition and ethnomusicology from Victoria University of Wellington, where she subsequently completed her Master of Music (with Merit) in composition. She also holds a Graduate Diploma in Teaching from the University of Auckland.
“I enjoyed performing and recording Yvette Audain’s Eulogy for narrator and orchestra very much. Such a warmth of texture and harmonies which created a sympathetic palette for Olivia Macassey’s word painting”
– Kenneth Young
“Yvette’s music always has a freshness of her own, often a quirky sense of humour, and an artistic freedom, especially in the more Eastern-style pieces I’ve heard or played in other Auckland performances, such as APO composition workshops, APO commissioned arrangements for youth concerts, 175 East, APO’s Remix, APOPS ensemble concerts, and the Clocktower Concerts of The Committee.”
– Katherine Hebley, cellist, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra and 175 East
Composed (75)
for any lead instrument(s) and accompanimental instrument (eg. flute and guitar), 2m 30s
For a primary school orchestra (bespoke arrangement): Violin I, Violin II, Cello, Flute I, Flute II, Alto Saxophone, Piano, Drum Kit, 1m