Hannah Reardon-Smith – Photography: Tangible Media
Hannah Reardon-Smith (she/her) is a flutist, improviser, composer, radio presenter, curator, activist, and writer living on unceded land of the Jagera, Yuggera, and Turrbal People. She is a co-artistic director of Brisbane-based contemporary art music ensemble Kupka’s Piano, a founding member of improvisation trio Rogue Three (Brisbane/Melbourne: flute/s, trombone, and recorder/s), and perfoms solo on Ableton-extended flute as cyberBanshee. She has performed in international festivals including ManiFESTE (Paris), IMD (Darmstadt, DE), SPOR (Aarhus, DK), Kunstenfestival des Arts (Brussels), BIFEM (Bendigo, AU), Totally Huge New Music Festival (Perth), and the Queensland Music Festival (Brisbane). She previously completed an Advanced Master in Contemporary Music Performance at the School of Arts in Ghent, Belgium (2014-2016), under the mentorship of ensemble ICTUS and flutists Mike Schmid (ICTUS) and Helen Bledsoe (musikFabrik), where she undertook a detailed study of Richard Barrett’s codex scores for improvising ensembles. Hannah is a current PhD candidate at the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University, exploring a queer-feminist thinking of free improvisation founded in sympoiesis and contamination, featuring the work and voices of women and non-binary folk practicing in the field. Her music reveals the sweetness in unsettling difficulty, and reveals the monsters lurking in traditionally beautiful instruments.