Music Performance UNSW has announced that Dr Nicholas Vines has been selected as the 2025 Willgoss Choral Composition Prize winner for his composition A Bhandari Pilgrimage.
Supported by the late Dr Richard Willgoss and Sue Willgoss, the Prize awards Dr Vines a monetary prize and the premiere performance of his work. The Willgoss Choral Composition Prize aims to celebrate Australian composers and provide invaluable support to the Australian choral community.
Dr Vines is an accomplished composer whose work has been performed across Australia, America, Europe and Asia. He has been commissioned by organisations including ChamberMade Opera, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Apex, the Acacia Quartet and more.
Dr Vines provides an overview of the origins and development of A Bhandari Pilgrimage:
Last December, I spent a few weeks in beautiful Nepal. Part of that time was in Gulmi, a rural area in the country's centre, made up of quiet villages and rolling 'hills' (mountains, by our standards). Ubiquitous smart phones aside, this idyllic region has seen little change for at least five hundred years.
While there, I was invited to visit the holy places of a local family, located near the top of a very steep and substantial incline. The trip there, up from their ancestral valley, was a little hair-raising, but did not last long and featured spectacular views. The sites themselves included a pond, recently constructed through familial funding; a stone, supremely ancient and housed in its own hut; and a temple, replete with a row of bells and kaleidoscopic religious paraphernalia.
For the family, our brief pilgrimage appeared to be an unremarkable, everyday act of devotion; for me, however, it was a unique and surprisingly moving experience. This work is an attempt to communicate some of that sense of wonder.
