Born in 1978, Rowen grew up in regional South Australia’s Riverland, along the Murray river. He studied composition and Chinese ethnomusicology with Peter Brideoake, at the Elder Conservatorium in Adelaide, completing his Bachelor of Music Composition in 2001. During this time he learnt undergraduate conducting with Carl Crossin OAM, and studied voice with Florin Radulescu at the State Opera of South Australia.

Upon completing his studies, Rowen left Australia for five years on a quest partly to find his own compositional voice. He lived and worked in many beautiful and remote regions, including the Canadian Northwest Territories, Scandinavia, Greenland, Iceland, Germany and Greece. As a composer, Rowen finds himself most inspired by the natural world, and many of his compositions found their genesis at this time in the emotions of his travels through spectacular landscapes. The Australian landscape currently inspires Rowen’s writing, in particular that of his home in the Blue Mountains, to which he relocated in 2011. He returned to studies shortly after, and received, in 2016, a Masters of Composition from the Sydney Conservatorium, University of Sydney under the supervision of Anne Boyd.

Rowen had an early love of the theatre. He was a children’s cast member of the 1994 professional production of The Wizard of Oz at the Adelaide Festival Centre. He gained experience as an actor, director and musical director in amateur and semi-professional theatre, including with the Adelaide Theatre Guild, The Bakehouse Theatre and This Rough Magic Theatre Co. He began to write music for the stage and created incidental music for the Bakehouse Theatre’s The Tempest (2002) and This Rough Magic Theatre Co’s As You Like It (2008). He composed the music for the short film Still Life (This Rough Magic, 2003), which was nominated for Best Soundtrack in the Adelaide Short Film Awards in 2004.

In 2008, Rowen wrote and produced the short one-act cabaret Six by Seuss for the inaugural Adelaide Cabaret Fringe Festival at La Boheme. Billed as a classical suite for vocalists and chamber ensemble, and staged as a devised music-theatre piece, this work was critically acclaimed as “a remarkable achievement in local classical music and opera”.[1]

Rowen’s experience writing for the stage, and for voice in particular, culminated in his first full-length chamber opera, Chang’E and the Moon, which premiered in Wentworth Falls, NSW, in April 2016. Chang’E and the Moon grew out of Rowen’s deep regard for Chinese classical literature and music, and is an inspired retelling of the myth of the Chinese Goddess of the Moon, Chang’E. The opera is also a poem to the physical moon as a part of our landscape, and a meditation on nature’s cycles, reflecting Rowen’s interest in philosophical Taoism.

Rowen is passionate about making music for and with his local community. Since relocating to the mountains in 2011, he has expanded his work as a choral conductor. You can read more about his work with choirs here. His body of work includes many choral arrangements and new instrumental transcriptions of works from the classical canon, designed to offer new performance possibilities to groups who cannot work with an orchestra.

Rowen participated in the Sydney Youth Orchestra’s 2014 composer in residence string ensemble program, composing works for two different junior ensembles. In 2017, he was commissioned to compose a new fanfare for Inaburra School’s concert band and string orchestra for their 35th Anniversary. He enjoys the discipline of writing for differing levels of musical ability and hopes to expand upon his body of composition for schools in the near future.

Rowen is available to write original music or arrangements for any ensemble. Contact him via the mail icon above to discuss your performance requirements.

[1]David O’Brien, dB Magazine, issue #442