Thomas Reiner
Senior Lecturer
Co-ordinator of Music Composition
Email: thomas.reiner@arts.monash.edu.au
Phone: (03) 9905 3228
Fax: (03) 9905 3241
Location: Performing Arts Centre, Room 119 Clayton Campus
Thomas Reiner is an award-winning composer who has won prizes in the International Witold Lutoslawski Composers’ Competition, the ALEA III International Composition Competition at Boston University, and the International Boswil Composers’ Competition. Locally, he has received the Dorian Le Gallienne Award for Composition and the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award. In 2007 he was awarded the Dean’s Teaching Award for excellence in teaching.
His prolific compositional output consists of solo pieces, chamber works, orchestral compositions, works for music theatre, vocal works, concept pieces, electro-acoustic and electronic works. His music has been performed, broadcast and recorded in many countries, and by some of the leading exponents of contemporary music. Most of his works are published with the Australian Music Centre. Recordings of his music are released on several CDs and have received critical acclaim.
In 1996 he was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne for his research into the semiotic nature of musical time. His book Semiotics of Musical Time was published in 2000 by Peter Lang Publishing in New York. He is the founder and artistic director of the Melbourne-based contemporary music ensemble re-sound, which over the years has made a substantial contribution to the presentation and promotion of Australian work.
Reiner writes “My music is concerned with questions of musical time, music semiotics, contemporary aesthetics and performance practice, dialectical thought, emotion, and beauty. I treat music as art and as such I believe that it must aspire to be free in every sense of the word. I also recognize, however, that postmodern thought poses a significant challenge to the concept of art and, by extension, to the concept of art music. This is reflected, to some extent, in my music’s inclusion of, and reference to, popular styles.”