2025 Hatched Emerging Performer
We’re excited to announce our 2025 Hatched Emerging Performer Ronan Apcar!
Previously studying at ANAM in Melbourne and ANU in Canberra, Ronan will be moving home to join Ensemble Offspring for our 2025 season. Performing alongside the ensemble for Divine Darkness and the Hatched showcase, Future Classics, Ronan will also be developing his own project throughout the year with the support of EO. We interviewed Ronan about being chosen as the Hatched Emerging Performer and his plans for next year with Ensemble Offspring.
You are originally a Sydney boy - why is it so special to be returning home to join Sydney’s musical mavericks in 2025?
When I was in high school, I remember our music class being taken to an Ensemble Offspring concert and thinking to myself that this was the sort of music I liked and how much cooler it was that the composers were actually at the gig with us - that was still a bit of a foreign concept for a 16 year old! So it's pretty cool that after living and studying interstate for a few years, I get to come home and join EO for the year!
What are you most looking forward to in terms of working closely with the musicians of Ensemble Offspring, who all have so much experience in the world of new music?
I'm probably most looking forward to being a sponge in rehearsal. I'm always very curious to observe other musicians' approaches to rehearsals and I feel like you can often work out a lot of their philosophies about music from just a single rehearsal. Also, I'm more and more realising that opportunities to play new music/contemporary ensemble works are not as abundant as I'd like, so it'll be great to have a chance to do that with some really experienced and world class players.
What will your special Hatched project focus on?
I've been talking with Melbourne-based composer and artist Troy Rainbow about creating something that explores the post-truth world, for example: delusions, alternate truths, or Plato's allegory of the cave. In winter, I heard this amazing work Troy made for choir and tape which was extrapolated from his immersive XR theatre work The Door in Question - which simulated psychosis and schizophrenic delusions and their alternate views of the world. I'm hoping we can take some of his works and themes as a starting point to create a very cool piano work that might include spoken voice, tape, keyboards, or samples.
Tell us about your love of living new music and why as a pianist you choose to focus on that and not traditional classical music as much?
I'm not really sure why I'm more comfortable with modern and contemporary works. I still find it much harder to 'crack' a traditional work than a modern one. So while it's partly just a matter of taste, it's also partly that I find it much more meaningful to program and play living new music because it's by us, for us. Isn't it special for an audience to hear stories about where they're from? It's not that we shouldn't play music by composers from a different century and continent, but I really strongly believe in striving for a self-referential or self-sustainable cultural ecosystem, one that has a local cultural thread running through it. To me, that's the sign of a community or country with a strong sense of identity and community - and you can't have that without local artists creating work about what it means to be alive not just today, but in our case, today in Australia.
Do you prefer the weather in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra - and why?
Absolutely anywhere but Melbourne. Anyone who knew me in Melbourne knows I had serious beef with that city's weather. While I did enjoy the very-sunny Canberra and its bitter winter challenge that sometimes went for 6 months, I'd go Sydney for the summers - as long La Niña isn't around. I do not like her.
