Composers

Alan Hinde

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Alan Hinde was born in Sydney in 1951. He learnt piano and started composing during his high school years, mostly for piano solo, and later, the viola during university where he majored in science. In 1974 he moved to Canberra and in 1979 completed a PhD in theoretical organic chemistry.

Throughout his scientific career, Alan kept up an interest in music. He was mostly self-taught in composition and jazz improvisation but attended a number of courses at the Canberra School of Music, including briefly studying electronic music with Don Banks, and later attending courses in orchestration and jazz arranging.

During the mid 1980's Alan developed an interest in creating music using synthesisers as a means of obtaining both conventional and new acoustic-like instruments. This led to the creation of Journey to the Tower of Light, an album of music depicting an epic journey in the tradition of, for example, 'Lord of the Rings'. At the same time, Alan also produced music suitable for relaxation and meditation and visualisation, as well as other music, relaxing and evocative in nature, exemplified in the album Bubbling Cascade. His interest in jazz also led him to write a number of modern, or 'smooth', jazz works at that time.

Further development of digital orchestration led to a number of compositions that could be described as 'digitally orchestrated tone poems' and were written to accompany the prose-imagery of Melbourne author, Val Budge. The pieces Snow, Sherbrooke Forest, The Diamonds, and Symphonic Sketch - The Changing Face of Planet Earth were all composed as a direct result of reading Val's word-pictures of similar names. They are evocative works, describing Val's works.

In addition to several expressive piano solos, including Elegy, Drifting Leaf, Scherzando, Poem of Parting, Nocturne and The Winter Land, Alan has also written a number of orchestral works including The Conquest - Movement for Strings (premiered by the Canberra orchestra ‘Musica da Camera’ in 2001), Symphonic Sketch - The Changing Face of Planet Earth, Symphonic Poem - In Search of the Lost Land and Fantasy Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.

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