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Aviva Endean ^(Naarm)

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Aviva Endean is a clarinettist, composer, and sound artist dedicated to connecting people with each other and their environment through attentive listening. Based in Naarm/Melbourne, her practice spans works across experimental and improvised music, contemporary performance, installation, and cross-disciplinary collaborations. Her creative practice opens up possibilities for collaborations, transcending the traditional in favour of a dynamic artistry which embraces the unfamiliar. Whilst deeply steeped in music, her vision extends beyond her primary artform to expand ways in which sound can be experienced and understood, and to discover new forms of expression that reflect the here and now.

Aviva’s solo music has been released on Room40 (Australia), SOFA music (Norway) and FRIM records (Sweden), and she has toured her work to major festivals internationally including Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK), Sound of Stockholm (SE), and Jogja Noise Bombing Festival (IN) and has appeared as soloist with Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane Symphony Orchestras. She has worked in close collaboration with some of Australia’s most respected arts organisations including Chunky Move, Liquid Architecture, Australian Art Orchestra, Chamber Made, ELISION, Punctum, and TURA, and is an ongoing member of award-winning ensembles Hand to Earth, The Cloud Maker and Lung Swara.

Her career has been supported by significant opportunities and awards. She is currently an Ian Potter/Sidney Myer Fund Creative Fellow in 2026-27. In her early career she received the prestigious Freedman Fellowship (2015), Emerging Artist in Residence with Chamber Made (2014) and was the inaugural recipient of the ‘Pathfinder Music Leadership’ associate artists position with Australian Art Orchestra (2018-19). In 2025 she was granted the award for ‘Excellence in Experimental Practice’ at the AMC APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards and recipient of the Phillip Hunter Fellowship (University of Melbourne) for 2026. She was Associate Artist at Banff Centre in Canada (2019), recipient of Creative Victoria’s Creators Fund for a 6-month self-directed research project (2023), and resident composer at The Peggy Glanville Hicks home in Sydney (2021). She has undertaken short term residencies at The Unconformity (TAS), Bundanon (NSW), Time Space Place Nomad (VIC) Sound Out (Poland), and OMI (New York).

As a composer and performance maker, Aviva often explores expanding the audience experience of sound by creating unusual, spatially engaged, and participatory contexts for listening. Her recent original work in this area include Tactile Piece for Human Ears, a piece performed to a binaural dummy head and heard through bluetooth headphones (presented by Chamber Made and Now or Never Festival), Sonic Labyrinth an interactive journey through sound for children and adults alike (originally presented by Castlemaine State festival/Melbourne Fringe, and now reimagined as a year long-drop in installation at Art Play) Stranger a performance installation for an ensemble audience (nominated for a Greenroom award contemporary and experimental performance), Vibrato Virtual a participatory sound work using mobile phone speakers (Chamber made/Liquid Architecture), Ping Pong Pop a game piece for live spinning contrabass clarinet player, audience and ping pong balls (Dark MOFO), Domicile a performance installation work inhabiting a family home (New Music Network mini series), Intimate Sound Immersion, a performance for one blindfolded person at a time (You Are Here festival), In the Half Light, a show for solo clarinet and immersive lighting design (ASTRA Chamber Music society) and A Face Like Yours (2014) a sound work for video, foam earplugs and viewer which continues to be programmed at festivals internationally (including: Maerz Musik (Germany), Instalakje (Poland), Stanford University (CA), Kinetic Manchester (UK).

Her debut solo release cinder : ember : ashes featuring improvisations and original compositions was released on Norwegian label SOFA in 2018 to critical acclaim, with reviews speaking to Aviva’s innovation and virtuosity, and describing the work as ‘captivating, sophisticated, stunning, miraculous’ & ‘trance-inducing’. Her follow up electro-acoustic album ‘Moths & Stars’ (Room40 2022) captured the imagination of listeners with its richly textured sound worlds; reviews claiming ‘Endean has proven time and time again that she is an expert of the aural adventure’.

Her current ensembles include Hand to Earth an improvising band featuring Yolŋu songkeepers Daniel and David Wilfred, Korean born singer Sunny Kim, and trumpeter Peter Knight (Winner: ‘Best avant-garde/experimental act’ Music Victoria) , and The Cloud Maker a powerful line up of 5 female-identifying musicians who draw on stories of goddesses from their many shared heritages to create music which echoes tales of creation, regeneration and transformation (Winner: ‘Performance of the Year’ for Improvised music APRA/AMCOS Art Music Awards), Lung Swara collaboration with Javanese singer and dancer Cahwati Sugiarto, and experimental percussionist Matthias Schack-Arnot working with Javanse song and visceral sonic textures to create music that is hypnotic and transformational (Winner: Best in Music Melbourne Fringe 2025), and Driftwood, a duo project with Nick Ashowood using microtonally retuned antique pump organs, guitars and clarinets (released on Room40).

Aviva is also active as a collaborator on interdisciplinary projects. She created the score for Chunky Move’s large scale immersive performance work Token Armies for the Melbourne International festival 2019 (winner Greenroom award, best composition for Dance) and Rewards for the Tribe (RISING, Warwick Arts Centre UK), for which she also scored the feature documentary about the making of the work (Melbourne/Adelaide/Sydney Film Festivals), and worked alongside dancer/choreographer Rebecca Jensen to create SLIP (Keir Choreographic award/FRAME biennale/Tempo Festival/Platform Arts). Her work was also featured in films Assembly by Angelica Mesiti for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2019, and The Empyrean by Amiel-Courtin Wilson.

Aviva acknowledges that her practice has been developed on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Dja Dja Wurrung and Gadigal people. She commits to working respectfully to honour ongoing cultural and spiritual connections to country, as well as elders, past, present and future.

Tone List (est. 2016) is a Boorloo-based label for exploratory music.

We release albums, host concerts and workshops, present the annual Audible Edge Festival, and support adventurous musicians and listeners.