Aaron Choulai

My practice as a composer, pianist and conductor grows from a lived reality of multiple, layered cultural identities. I am an albino from Papua New Guinea, with mixed Chinese and Polish heritage, and with lived experience as an immigrant to Australia and Japan. This foundation isn’t incidental to my work; it is the work. My artistic intention is to show the intersection and plurality of culture, highlighting areas of shared practice that emerge from a postcolonial rebuilding of cultural identity, and to present that complexity with nuance in a contemporary framework.

This has led me to create contemporary compositions that incorporate a wide range of musical language from Papuan choral traditions to freestyle rap,, not as an exercise in eclecticism, but as a reflection of how these traditions genuinely coexist within my own artistic and cultural experience. The music is not about plurality for its own sake. It is about cultural specificity.

A central ambition of my work is audience. I am committed to bringing new and more diverse audiences into the creative music space, people who may not yet feel a relatability to art music, but whose cultures, stories and musical lineages are deeply present in the work I make. Art music in Australia has an extraordinary opportunity to speak to the full diversity of this country, and I approach that opportunity with both urgency and a sense of responsibility.

As Artistic Director of the Australian Art Orchestra, I am committed to building an organisation whose work genuinely reflects Australia as an Asia Pacific nation. The AAO has a distinguished history of adventurous work, and I see my role as extending that spirit into new cultural and geographic territory, with a particular focus on deepening our engagement across the Asia Pacific region.

My practice is ultimately driven by the conviction that music rooted in a particular cultural truth is capable of speaking widely, and that the art music space is most vital when it holds room for the full range of human experience.