Corrina Bonshek (PhD Western Sydney University) is an award-winning Gold Coast-based Australian composer best known for her immersive, site-responsive works inspired by nature. Her music has been described as ‘sonically attractive’ (Loudmouth 2020), ‘meditative and euphonious’ (Journal of Music 2021), with ‘pared-back language and gentle, reflective motion’ (The Irish Times) and as ‘connected to the essence of South-East Asian music – timelessness’ (Chinary Ung, 2015).
Her compositional practice spans notated art music, electronics, environmental sound, spatial composition and improvisation, often bringing together musicians from different cultural and musical traditions. Her collaborations in Asia have been a major influence on her compositional voice, contributing to a distinctive musical language that draws on the intersections of European art music, sonic art and Southeast Asian musical traditions. She uses a Southeast Asian floating sensibility to create dramatic shifts of character and pacing, underpinned by a meditative unity informed by a deep connection to nature.
Corrina regularly composes for festivals and cultural institutions. Her music has been presented across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, including at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York, Place des Arts Montréal, Sydney Opera House, the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia, Brisbane Festival, Singapore Arts in Your Neighbourhood Festival, Bleach Festival, Rainforest Fringe Festival Malaysia, Hervey Bay Whale Festival and the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games Arts & Culture Festival.
In 2021 she formed Corrina Bonshek & Collaborators to create and tour innovative music-led experiences that explore connection between people, culture and the natural world. This has enabled Corrina to extend her composition beyond the concert hall into theatres, galleries, parks and unusual resonant spaces, while continuing to place music at the centre of the work.
Her major works include Song to the Earth, a 90-minute live music installation for string orchestra, percussion and environmental sound, co-commissioned for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games; its sister works Song to the Ocean and Song to the Whales; The Space Between Us, an evolving chamber work adapted for musicians and resonant spaces internationally; Piano Room, combining live piano, poetry and spatial sound; and Swimming Through a Universe of Sound, an electronic deep-listening work in which audiences experience music through both spatial sound and handheld vibrating speakers.
Song to the Whales, developed through collaboration with Canadian ensemble Oktoecho, Bunna Lawrie, WHAIA and Inuit throat singers, toured North America in 2025 with performances in Montréal, Toronto, Niagara and New York, including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The Space Between Us has similarly evolved through international collaboration, with presentations in Malaysia, Estonia, Finland, Portugal and Iceland.
Corrina’s concert music has been recorded and released by leading Australian musicians including Alex Raineri, Jason Noble, Karen Schuapp, and the Bowerbird Collective. Her music is released on US label Navona Records and regularly broadcast on ABC Classic. Her site-specific work Journey to the Centre is permanently installed in Centennial Park Sydney’s public labyrinth and received more than 5,000 downloads in its first year. The work has been featured on ABC TV’s The Compass Program, ABC Radio National Off Track, and is the subject of a 30-minute radio feature for ABC Radio National’s The Rhythm Divine called The Labyrinth meditation.
Corrina was awarded the 2022 Queensland Music Award for Best Contemporary Classical Work for Dreams of the Earth, a concert-hall adaptation of Song to the Earth. She was a finalist in the 2018 Art Music Awards – Instrumental Work of the Year for Up in the Clouds, a work for septet that reimagined pipa sound-colours and gestures from her solo work for Taiwanese virtuoso Jasmine Chen, and a finalist in the 2025 APRA AMCOS Professional Development Awards – Experimental & Classical category.
Corrina graduated with a PhD in Contemporary Arts from Western Sydney University in 2007, where she was the first music postgraduate to divide her submission equally between a composition portfolio and musicological thesis. Her research explored experimental music theatre alongside her own creative practice. She studied composition with Dr Bruce Crossman and has since received mentoring from Grawemeyer Award-winning composer Professor Chinary Ung. International residencies and professional development have included the Experimental Thai Music Laboratory at Burapha University in Thailand, Nirmita Institute for Young Composers in Cambodia and the Arvo Pärt Centre in Estonia.
Her current compositions are extending this musical language in new directions. Alongside her immersive and site-responsive work, Corrina is increasingly exploring how music can carry narrative, character and ideas. Works in development include A Little Plot of Land, with playwright Tasnim Hossain; Algorithm Shaman, exploring algorithmic persuasion and human behaviour; and SHEDS – Stories from the Shearing Shed, bringing documentary stories from regional communities into live music performance.
Corrina has received numerous grants from Creative Australia, Music Australia, Arts Queensland, the Australian Government’s RISE Fund and the City of Gold Coast. Between 2000-2007, Corrina was a sessional lecturer/tutor in musicology at Western Sydney University. During this time she presented numerous papers on experimental music-theatre (including her own creative practice) at conferences including the National Conference of the Musicology Society of Australia, the Symposium of the International Society of Musicology, Graduate Music Symposia of the Sydney Chapter of the Musicological Society, and the annual symposia of the University of Western Sydney School of Arts. Corrina has written articles for the Australian Music Centre’s Resonate Magazine, Cut Common, Body Space and Technology, Contemporary Music Review and published a chapter in The Big Fish: Consciousness as Structure, Body and Space (Rodopi).
For her musings on composing and creativity 2014-2019, visit her blog