Artists

Leah Blankendaal is an award-winning musician whose language is “kind, immersive and thoughtful,” and offers “us space to breathe and to be.”

At home as a composer and performer, Blankendaal’s composition spans orchestral, chamber and vocal music, as well as electro-acoustic improvisation and installation art. Composition collaborators include Quince Ensemble (USA), Duo Alterity (USA), Rubiks Collective (VIC), Luminescence Chamber Singers (ACT), Soundstream (SA) and Tura New Music and STRUT Dance (WA). Blankendaal’s performance practice for flute and loop pedal has been critically celebrated for “gracefully summoning you into its realm with its beautiful harmonic suspensions and resolutions”. Her work has toured Europe, Southeast Asia, USA and New Zealand. Blankendaal has received the ABC Classic Commissioning Fund, APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund, Peggy Glanville Hicks Commission, the Australian Music Centre Classical: Next Fellowship, and the 2025 Momentum Plus Orchestral Initiative. She released her first album, Alongside, Amongst, Against, in September 2020.

In Residence at Bundanon

I will be examining and reworking the music of Australian composer May Brahe, as part of a new, multi-channel sound installation for voices and composed sound. A prolific writer of choral music, Brahe’s best-known song ‘Bless this house’ is a nod to traditional perceptions of domesticity, in the hymn style of late 19th century England. While in residence I will use this hymn as source material to create music that explore domesticity as an act of radical expression: of devotion, complexity, defiance, and regeneration.