Iain Grandage

Iain Grandage is a composer of scores for theatre, dance and the concert
hall. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the WA Symphony Orchestra, the Youth Orchestras of Australia, UWA School of Music and Black Swan Theatre Company.

He has won Helpmann and Green Room Awards for theatre scores, which include Cloudstreet, The Blue Room, Vamp, Babes in the Wood, Plainsong, The Odyssey, & True West, for companies including Co.B Belvoir, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Theatre Company, Perth Theatre Company and Black Swan Theatre. His works for dance include scores for the award-winning Lawn (Splinter Group), Remember Me (DanceNorth with the Townsville Chamber Music Festival) and Drover's Wives (Steamworks/PIAF2006).

Iain's concert works have been performed by the Brodsky String Quartet, Craig Ogden, Miki Tsunoda, the WA Symphony Orchestra and youth orchestras around Australia. His choral works are published by Morton Music and have been performed throughout Australia, Europe and the USA. He has won APRA/AMC awards for a number of works and been a member of Bulletin Magazine's Smart 100. He has completed orchestral arrangements for Ben Folds, Augie March, Tim & Tex, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Tiddas and the Whitlams. He has composed an opera for children, a song cycle for Sara Macliver and incidental music for short films, documentaries, ABC radio, BBC Radio3 and Radio4.

In 1996 and 1998, Iain was musical director and arranger for the national tours of Jimmy Chi's multi award winning Corrugation Road, and his involvement with indigenous musicians has continued through his collaborations with the Spinifex people of central Australia, initially on the theatre work Career Highlights of the Mamu, and subsequently with concert works in collaboration with WASO and Topology. A documentary on these collaborations titled 'Ooldea' first aired on ABC TV in March 2007. For the 2007 Festival of Perth, Iain composed and conducted an overture featuring Noongah soloists, a 600 voice choir and percussion ensemble performing the Noongah Welcome to Country. Most recently, Iain was musical supervisor and one of the arrangers for Hidden Republic, a collaboration between the Black Arm Band and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which premiered to great acclaim in the 2008 Melbourne Festival.

As a performer, he plays in the cello and beats band wood, the chamber ensemble Windstrokes with William Barton, Claire Edwardes and Melanie Robinson, and has moonlighted with the Brodsky Quartet, Australian Art Orchestra and Topology. He regularly performs on Piano with cabaret ,berdiva Meowmeow, most recently in their co-written theatre piece Vamp which played to sold-out houses at the Malthouse and Sydney Opera House Studio.

Future projects include music for the theatre work Optimism for Malthouse, touring to the Edinburgh Festival, a score for Stalker Theatre for a number of Australia festivals, and the score for The Book of Everything, a collaboration between Co. B Belvoir and Theatre of Image, premiering in January 2010.