GEORGINA PALMER
Georgina Palmer is a New Zealand composer, currently in her final year of Honours study at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Her notable career highlights to date include winning the 2020 SOUNZ NZCF Choral Composition Competition, winning the 2022 Audrey Reid Orchestra Composition Prize, having a work performed by the National Youth Brass Band of NZ, and having a work performed in the Celebrating Global Harmony Through Music concert at Carnegie Hall in December 2022. Recently, she was the Emerging Composer for the 2023 At The World's Edge Classical Music Festival in Queenstown, NZ. Scroll down to read her full biography.
Georgina Palmer is a 22-year-old New Zealand composer, currently in her final year of tertiary composition study at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
She began piano lessons in 2008 at the age of six and started composing small piano works shortly thereafter (performing the first of these in a local performing arts competition at the age of seven). Her involvement with music continued throughout school; after beginning violin and percussion tuition in 2016, she became involved with a variety of school music ensembles, including choirs, jazz bands, rock bands and multiple award-winning chamber music groups. Georgina credits her final two years of schooling – at Nelson College for Girls – as the most significant to her musical development; whilst there Georgina won the SOUNZ Big Sing Choral Composition Competition with her work A Music Everywhere, which has since been performed and broadcasted several times around Aotearoa. A Music Everywhere was part of a portfolio of three works that Georgina submitted for the NZQA Scholarship Music awards in late 2020; she received an Outstanding result – the highest possible mark nationwide. She also attained Distinction for her ATCL Diploma on Piano the following year.
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Georgina has received a number of commissions from a variety of ensembles, including acclaimed violinist Rakuto Kurano (for whom she wrote A Day In The Village), The National Youth Brass Band of New Zealand (for whom she rearranged A Music Everywhere; Georgina also played percussion with the Band in 2021), and a number of Melbourne-based choirs. She was also the 2022 recipient of the Audrey Reid Composition Prize for A Grand Adventure and performed percussion in the work’s debut at Dunedin Town Hall in September 2022.
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Image by Jesse Fletcher, March 2025.
​Outside of commissioned pieces, Georgina is actively involved in the rehearsing, performing and conducting of performances of her work, both in New Zealand and internationally. This includes the performance of Upon Clee Hill (a string orchestra work dedicated to her grandparents) at Carnegie Hall in New York City in December 2022. She has also conducted performances of her work by the Newport Strings Group and CHIME Choir, among other Melbourne-based ensembles.
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In October 2023, Georgina attended the fortnight-long AWE (At the World’s Edge) classical music festival in Queenstown, New Zealand as the Emerging Composer-In-Residence. After being selected for the residency in May that year, she composed a new work – Maramataka – for French Horn, violin and cello under the mentorship of prominent New Zealand composer Salina Fisher (via Zoom). The work was debuted at the festival by acclaimed London-based French Horn player Ben Goldscheider, along with the festival’s Emerging Artists Lorna Zhang (violin) and Damon Herlihy-O’Brien (cello). She regards her time at the festival as one of the most important experiences of her blossoming composing career to date, given the wealth of networking and personal development opportunities that came with the residency.
At university, Georgina continues to be involved in a variety of music projects, including joint-winning the Sutherland Trio Composition Prize with fellow composer and classmate Bryn Renard (for her piano trio, Emerge), and partaking in the annual Montsalvat Choral Festival (for which she wrote The Gift To Sing for The Casey Choir). In April 2024, she collaborated with Renard and fellow Melbourne Conservatorium of Music composer Xiaole Zhan to create comma means breathe, a new music concert highlighting the relationship between words, music, and local young adults’ perspectives on the world. Her main contribution to this concert was To Be At Peace, a short chamber work that uses text from fellow university students and explores themes around safety and comfort among youth.
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In the second half of 2024, Georgina completed an original score for the short animated pyschological-drama film You Are Not Asleep by Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) student Amelie Salinas, working in collaboration with sound designer and fellow VCA student Ella Dawson. Shortly thereafter, Georgina was commissioned by Victoria's premier A-Grade competitive brass band, Darebin-Preston City Brass (with whom she plays percussion), for their 90th Anniversary in 2024; for this, she wrote Spiritus Aeris (The Spirit of Brass), and she performed in its debut at Federation Square in Melbourne in November 2024.
Georgina is a regular ambassador for the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at both online and in-person events, and throughout 2024 was also involved in a year-long internship as a broadcasting assistant at Melbourne’s classical music radio station, 3MBS. She is excited to continue working with a variety of ensembles and performance contexts in the future, as well as continuing her involvement with other arts-related work in both New Zealand and Australia.