In deep symphony

As she prepares for the premiere of her Requiem, Auckland composer Victoria Kelly talks about the personal loss and poetry that inspired the work.

- ELIZABETH KERR

Victoria Kelly's first thoughts about writV father died suddenly during the final year of her bachelor's degree in music performance on the oboe. She was 20 and it was just a few months before her final recital. Her musical life changed direction.

"In the months of shock and disbelief after my father's death, I realised I didn't want to play the oboe," she says. "I abandoned my performance degree and made a strong decision to pursue composition.

I've always felt like a composer, actually. The first thing I did musically as a kid was makeup melodies." ing a requiem came when her She knew that one day she would write music to express her feelings about that profound loss and the death of a teenage friend a few years earlier. Meanwhile, some doors were opening on to her composing future.

"A film director phoned the [University of Auckland] music school, asking, 'Do you have a student who's interested in writing for film?" They mentioned my name and I wrote the music for her five-minute film - and caught the bug." In 1996, that bug took Kelly to the United States to study film composition at the University of Southern California. Her teachers included Elmer Bernstein, Leonard Rosenman and Christopher Young. She's since amassed a long list of film and television soundtrack credits and has acted as an arranger and orchestrator for the likes of Neil Finn, Tami Neilson, Don McGlashan, Anika Moa and Shapeshifter.