Davies’ music has been performed by leading Australian and international ensembles including the West Australian, Tasmanian and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra (Finland). As current composer-in-residence with the WA Symphony Orchestra, a position supported by Prue Ashurst, Davies has worked with internationally acclaimed conductors, including Maestro Asher Fisch and Maestro Dmitry Matvienko. Her tenure concludes in 2025 with two world premieres.
In addition to her orchestral work, Davies also engages in highly collaborative projects, often integrating electronics and drawing on her visual art practice. In 2023, she presented a 6-hour audio-visual performance-installation titled Gradient at Perth Festival. Developed with Callum G’Froerer and Nick Roux, Gradient later earned a 2024 Art Music Award nomination for Electroacoustic/Sound Art.
Olivia has received several awards and scholarships including the Schenberg Music Fellowship in Composition (2021), and the 2022 Art Music Award: Large Ensemble for her orchestral work Stratus (2021). In 2023, Davies was awarded the prestigious Peggy Glanville-Hicks House residency in Sydney, where she composed Murmuration—a notable choral work that became the focus of a short portrait documentary on Davies by Australian director Melle Branson.
Based in Naarm (Melbourne, Victoria), she continues in her role as mentor for the WA Symphony Orchestra's composition project, and as associate staff in Music and Performing Arts at Monash University, overseeing the development of new interactive compositions through one-on-one tutoring.
Olivia Bettina Davies (b.1988) is an Australian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music spanning multiple genres including classical minimalism, experimental, ambient and drone.
Drawing inspiration from natural processes, Davies’ compositions reflect a nuanced relationship between texture, time and form. With radical restraint and a deep sensitivity to sonic detail, Davies crafts texturally rich and evocative soundworlds, inviting listeners to experience the delicate interplay of tension and resolution.
AWARDS/RESIDENCIES
2023 Prelude Residency recipient of the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer House, Sydney.
2022 Art Music Award recipient, Category: Large Ensemble, Work: Stratus (2021). Premiered March 4th 2021, conducted by Maestro Asher Fisch.
“...there is a kind of disciplined organicism and refined complexity which eschews affective gestures in favour of a complete confidence in the ideas and the material.” - Will Yeoman, Limelight, 4 August 2024
“The violins swiftly and collectively swirl to a dizzying degree, akin to a time-lapse of plants growing in a documentary—or fungi growing, rather. The vision in her work strongly bloomed into a modern masterpiece.” - Jay Darroch, Magazine 6000
“World premieres are always special but Olivia Davies’ choral work Murmuration seem to reset genre…”
- David Cusworth, The West Australian, 31 July 2023.
“...it was a force of nature captured in music; pregnant with possibilities beyond the first impression.”
- David Cusworth, The West Australian, 5 August 2023.