Beginning her life in an orphanage in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo, Nirmali Fenn was raised and educated in Australia, gaining highest honours in musical composition from the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne. A Clarendon Scholarship and an Overseas Research Students Award enabled her to complete a doctorate at Oxford University.

After receiving Second Prize at the 26th Concorso Internazionale di Composizione in Turin in 2008, she is becoming increasingly known on the international stage, and has taken up appointments as Composer in Residence for the Saxophone Habanera Festival in Poitiers, France, and the Lake District Summer Music Festival, UK.

Her compositions have impressed many of the world's leading ensembles specializing in contemporary music, including the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Ensemble Linea, Kuss Quartet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tin Alley String Quartet, Sounds Underground and Endymion Ensemble. She is now a scholar at the The Society of Scholars in the Humanities, University of Hong Kong, which will enable time to concentrate on composition projects and lecturing.

Nirmali, whose artistic vision is constantly expanding, sees music wholly as an expression of the observation of social interactions, and her compositions often deal with the concept of unifying divisions.

How do we think in terms of wholes? Unifying Divisions is a social experiment where 17 saxophones divide into groups of 5 solo characters and 4 quartets, uniting to give the illusion of 1 instrument. The unification is achieved through the magnification of a single voice.


Composers can gain a lot from learning about the inner formation of a gesture from painters. Both Wassily Kandinsky, in his book Point and Line to Plane and Paul Klee in the Pedagogical Sketchbook, discuss forces within form. It is to Klee's Beschwingte Bindungen (Winged Links) that this piece is indebted. I 'paint', using my themes to mould the tensions within a point and to configure the totality of a gesture.


The 5 Steps theatricalises the 5 elements of Taoism - Wood (木), Fire (火), Earth (土), Metal (金), and Water (水). Each element is part of a holistic system that is assessed in terms of what it does rather than what it looks like. For instance, 'wood' symbolises birth, while 'earth' represents its inversion, a child giving birth to the mother. The 5 Steps is steeped in ritual ideas converging to express the correlation between the generative and degenerative processes that operate within nature and human life cycles.
Wood
Fire
Earth
Metal
Water

'For now we see through a glass darkly… my interpretation of St. Paul's statement in his letter to the Corinthians is that if a 'glass darkly' is pierced, as dramatised in the beginning of this piece, each individual, or in this case instrumentalist, is required to confront the challenges of this experience. Resolution, clarity and fulfilment will result from 'seeing' differently.