Photo courtesy of Keith Saunders www.keithsaundersphotography.com
Percy has had works performed by many of Australia’s leading vocal ensembles including The Song Company, Sydney Chamber Choir, Brisbane Chamber Choir, Young Voices of Melbourne, Adelaide Conservatorium Chorale, Sydney Conservatorium of Music Chamber Choir, Brisbane Birralee Voices and Sydney Children's Choir. Works by Heather Percy have been broadcast on ABC Classic FM including her Sonatina for Flute and Piano, performed by Virginia Taylor (flute) and Daniel de Borah (piano). Her Three Night Songs, commissioned in 2021 through the inaugural ABC Classic FM and ABC Jazz FM Composer Commissioning Fund won the APRA AMCOS Work of the Year: Choral, 2023.
Percy was awarded the Dame Roma Mitchell Churchill Fellow for Excellence in Performing Arts in 2005 and has a B.Mus.Ed from Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Master in Music from Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, Melbourne University and in 2023 graduated with a Master in Music (Composition) at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music where she studied with Associate Professor Paul Stanhope.
Heather Percy is an emerging Australian composer with a particular affinity for choral and vocal music, drawing on her own extensive experience as a music educator, choral director and chorister. She draws influence and inspiration from early music, incorporating early music sensibilities and composition techniques within a modernistic harmonic sound-world into her writing. Limelight magazine described Percy’s Locus iste (after Bruckner) as ‘cool and jazzy with diverging chromatics and harmonies which pivot on a pinpoint, seemingly ending suspended in thin air’ (Limelight Shamistha de Soysa on 21 March, 2022).
Percy began to pursue composition in 2014 after more than two decades as a music educator. Initially she focused on creating choral music for children and youth choirs for the purpose of creating music that effectively taught and developed specific music and choral skills.
​
Photo courtesy of Tyson Sadlo www.tysonsadlo.com