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ANNIE HUI-HSIN HSIEH is a Taiwanese-Australian composer whose work is situated in the intersection of contemporary classical and experimental music. Her music focuses on orchestrating immersive physical and sensory experiences that help us delve deeper into inquiries about embodied memories and the spatiotemporal understanding of selfhood.
Hsieh’s music has been presented internationally at events such as Beijing Modern Music Festival, Metropolis New Music Festival, OzAsia Festival, WasteLAnd Music Series (LA), The National Gallery of Victoria ‘Melbourne Now’ exhibition’, Tuesdays at Monk Space (LA), Center for New Music (SF), UC Davis The Art of Migration Festival, Mise-en Festival, Adelaide Festival, Tectonics Festival, International Society of Contemporary Music (ISCM) World Music Days, Asian Composers' League (ACL) Conference, International Rostrum of Composers, SEAMUS (Society of Electroacoustic Music US), NYCEMF (New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival), Seoul International Computer Music Festival, Opera Memphis Midtown Opera Festival, Eavesdropping Symposium (UK), Sonic Matters Festival (Switzerland), Pittsburgh Festival of New Music (USA), Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (UK), MATA Festival (New York), MaerzMusik (Berlin), and Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music (Australia).
Some recent commissions include Symphony Services Australia, The Arts Centre Melbourne, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Lucerne Festival, Wien Modern, Foundation Royaumont, Red Fish Blue Fish, Quince Ensemble, Hypercube Ensemble, and ELISION Ensemble, among others. Her works have also been performed by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, Canberra Symphony Orchestra, Ulysses Ensemble, Mivos Quartet (USA), Jack Quartet (USA), Rubriks Collective (Australia), The Sound Collector's Lab (Australia), The Monash Sinfonia (Australia), Thin Edge New Music Collective (Canada), Ensemble Paramirabo (Canada), Ensemble Dal Niente (USA), Arko Symphonic Ensemble (Australia), Syzygy Ensemble (Australia), Ensemble Offspring (Australia), NAT 28 (USA), Alia Musica (USA), Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (Switzerland), and Hong Kong New Music Ensemble (Hong Kong).
She has been a recipient of several awards and honors such as the 2017 APRA (Australian Performance Rights Association) Art Music Fund, the Dorian Le Gallienne Composition Award, as well as support from the New Music USA, Australian Cultural Fund, Australian Council of the Arts grants, the National Cultural and Arts Foundation (Taiwan), The Monash University International Women’s Day Composition Commission, the Monash Performance Art Centre David Li Sound Gallery Commission, and the Belegura Composer Award as part of the Melbourne Prize 2022.
Annie completed her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Melbourne and her doctorate degree from the University of California, San Diego. She is currently an Associate Professor in electronic music composition at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA.
- Current to October 2025
I am a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music. I am drawn to the nature of sound, which can be both private, personal, and abstract, open-ended. I am interested in the line that blurs the boundary between subjective expression and objective reality, as well as in the lines between intention, interpretation, and perception. As a medium, sound offers me endless possibilities to connect and express beyond words, and I strive to create works that speak to the multitude of the shared human condition.
My approach to composition is experimental and exploratory. I am motivated by the transformative power of experimental approaches in making and see them as praxis for addressing issues of power dynamics and identity. With a fondness for writing and making music with unconventional objects, such as those that are found, misused for art, or using conventional instruments in unusual ways, I find great joy in writing for musicians who push the envelope of performance practice.
Collaboration is at the core of my practice, and many of my works for solo or small ensembles were composed in close partnership with the musicians involved. An essential step in my creative process is deciding on the necessary spaces for my collaborators to insert their own creative agencies, as a departure from the traditional, top-down relationship between composer and performer, in which the composer's score is treated as a definitive document representing all aspects of the work itself. For me, the score is a map, a document listing the creative and sonic intentions, and the rehearsal process with the musicians is when the music is made. The piece’s potential is revealed through discussions of performance possibilities arising from the musicians’ own musical intuition and interpretation of the score. Music is inherently a social activity, and by working closely with my collaborators, the work can transcend my own understanding and imagination, making it a dialogue of exploration between myself and the musicians, us and the audience.
Concepts that I am currently exploring are how memories shape who we are. The spatiotemporality within which these memories exist plays a crucial role in how we retrieve this information in our minds, forming our belief systems and ways of being in the world. I am particularly inspired by moments when these private internal systems are violated and challenged, prompting unreliable memory recall and testing the reality of our own world.
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