Amanda Lee Falkenberg

Composer Amanda Lee Falkenberg has written film music and made a breakthrough into orchestral-choral music with her Moons Symphony. She is based in Dubai. Falkenberg was born on January 12, 1976, and grew up in Australia's Barossa Valley. Her parents were not professional musicians but loved music and exposed her to many different kinds, from the classics to the film Singin' in the Rain. Falkenberg took up the piano at age two and a half. Dreaming of a career as a concert pianist, she attended the Elder Conservatorium of Music in Adelaide, Australia. After finishing school, she landed a job as a dance accompanist with The Australian Ballet. Playing the prescribed rehearsal music, she began to wonder whether she could compose music that was more specific to the dancers' needs and aims, and that experience proved formative in her decision to switch from piano to composition. Falkenberg ended up writing more than 120 original compositions for dancers in training, and she compiled these into a three-part CD series called "Moving with Music." In 2003, she also composed a 30-minute ballet, Edge of the World, which was commissioned by and performed at the International Barossa Music Festival by Leigh Warren and dancers. Falkenberg has often written music for films, including the 2008 Emirati production Arabian Sands (an adaptation of a 1959 book by Wilfred Thesiger) and a 13-part animation series featuring voice-overs by actress Lucy Liu. She has released several albums of film music. Inspired by visual imagery, she has written concert music of various kinds, including an orchestral suite in 2017 called Sea Trilogy, whose premiere she conducted at the London Film Music Orchestra Gala Concert, and a piano concerto, Crossing of the Crescent Moon. She had already begun what would become five years of research on the moons of the solar system in preparation for her seven-movement work The Moons Symphony, which appeared in 2020 and won several awards. The work was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra and London Voices under conductor Marin Alsop, and the album was released on the Signum Classics label in 2022.
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