Biography

Johanna Selleck

 

Dr Johanna Selleck is a composer, flautist, and musicologist. She was born in 1959 and grew up in Eltham, Victoria. She began playing recorder, then flute, from the age of 10, studying under her first teacher, Philip Leenman. After completing a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in philosophy and criminology at the University of Melbourne in 1983, she gained her T.Mus.A and L.Mus A. in flute, followed by a B.Mus (1991) and M.Mus (1997) in performance and composition. She completed a Ph.D in composition at Melbourne University in 2007, studying under Brenton Broadstock and Kerry Murphy. She currently teaches at the Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, where she is an Honorary Fellow. She teaches flute at Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Melbourne and works as a freelance flautist, focusing on contemporary music. She also works as a flute examiner for the Australian Music Examinations Board. She has one son and currently lives with her husband in Upper Ferntree Gully, Victoria.

Johanna has composed a wide range of chamber, orchestral, vocal, and electronic works. Her compositions have been performed by the Queensland, Tasmania, and Melbourne Symphony orchestras and have been featured in numerous festivals including the Port Fairy Festival (1998, 1999, 2000), the Composing Womens’ Festivals in Melbourne (1994)  and Canberra (2001), the Barwon Heads Festival of the Sea (2009), the 3rd Australian Harp Festival (2008), and in St. James, Malta, during Maltese Australian Culture Week (2004). Johanna performed the solo part of her flute concerto Unspoken Dialogues with the Melbourne Symphony in a recording project for Melbourne composers at the Iwaki Auditorium in 2003. Unspoken Dialogues was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Fauxharmonic Orchestra’s International Composition Competition in 2009.

Commissioned works include pieces for Ensemble Zauberflöte, Melbourne University, the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne Grammar, the Cairnmillar Institute, the Australian Contemporary Chorale, Astra, and the Song Company. Her music has been recorded and released through Move Records (the CD Giants in the Land featuring pianist Ian Holtham) and is published by Allans Music, Reed Music, and the Centre for Studies in Australian Music.  Her first Sonata for Flute was composed for and premiered by ABC Young Performer of the Year, Andrew Day, in 2008.

Johanna has published articles and reviews in the ABC’s Limelight magazine, Cambridge Scholars Press, the Australasian Musicolgical Research Journal, the Victorian Flute Guild’s magazine The Flautist, and the Australian Music Teacher magazine (among others). She worked as a music critic for Melbourne’s Herald Sun between 1996 and 2002. Her Ph.D thesis, Notions of Identity: A Socio-Cultural Interpretation of Music in Melbourne, 1880–1902, has been accepted for publication by Lambert Academic Press, Germany.

Between 2004 and 2008, Johanna was employed as the assistant at the Centre for Studies in Australian Music at Melbourne University. During this time, she compiled and edited four issues of the Centre’s Review. She also produced and edited a volume of song settings to the poems by Ern Malley (the product of Harold Stewart and James MacAuley’s infamous literary hoax of 1944). Entitled Ern Malley’s The Darkening Ecliptic: Song Settings by Australian Composers, the book will be published by Lyrebird Press (Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre) in 2010. She has served for over 20 years on the Leslie Barklamb Scholarship Committee and various festival committees of the Victorian Flute Guild.

Currently, Johanna is the editor of Da Yig, the newsletter of the Tibetan Women's Association and Friends Australia. TWAFA is one of 49 chapters worldwide, which support Tibetan refugees. The parent branch, the Tibetan Women's Assocation, is based in Dharamsala, India. Johanna is the Vice-President of TWAFA.

In 1990, Johanna won the Percy Grainger Prize for Composition. In 1995, she won second place in the South African International Composers’ Eisteddfod. In 2006, she was awarded First Prize in the Albert H. Maggs Composition Award for Australian Composers.

In April 2010, Johanna will be collaborating with the internationally renowned blues harmonica player, Corky Siegel, to compose a concerto for harmonica and chamber orchestra. The Corky Siegel project is supported by the Victorian Government through Arts Victoria.