Katie Yap
violist & curator
About
Violist, curator and composer Katie Yap is an artist who brings people together. She uses her instrument’s role of collaborator to amplify the voices of her colleagues and audience with her own warm, authentic voice. Through deeply layered curation, she shares her music as a natural part of life, as a way to build connection in real time.Born in Meanjin/Brisbane and now based in Nipaluna/Hobart, Katie is the 2022 Freedman Fellow, a 2023-4 Musica Viva Australia FutureMaker, 2024-5 ANAM/Ian Potter Emerging Performer Fellow, and 2025-26 Van Diemen's Band Curation Fellow. Her focus in these projects explores a life-long fascination with improvisation, collaborative composition, and her love of the natural world.Chamber music being closest to her heart, she is a founding member of the Gryphon Baryton Trio, baroque viola/synth duo Bronzewing, and is co-artistic director of crossover folk/baroque group Wattleseed Ensemble. From 2021-24, she was was the founding artistic director of 3MBS’s women-in-music chamber festival ‘Music, She Wrote’.She plays regularly with Australia’s top period and modern ensembles including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Van Diemen’s Band and the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and is also the Artistic Coordinator with VDB. In her spare time, she is apprenticed in the fine arts of Hainanese chicken rice and Dutch apple tart; and loves to watch turbo chooks chase each other down near the Newtown Rivulet.
Projects
Multitudes
Freedman Fellowship project
Collaborative composition, recording and concerts
Bronzewing
Genre-bending duo with Donald Nicolson combining harpsichord, synths, viola, and vocals
Wattleseed Ensemble
Melbourne-based early/folk/new music crossover group
Music, She Wrote
3MBS's festival celebrating women in music, 2021-4
Music
Black Cockatoos
(Donald Nicolson & Katie Yap)
Aftermath (Emily Sheppard)
In My Solitude (Andrew Ford)
Sonata no. 1 in D major (G. F. Handel)
liebeslied (Matt Laing)
Words
On Connection
For Loudmouth Magazine, 2022
Images
© Darren James
© Grant Leslie
© Darren James
© Darren James
© Grant Leslie
© Darren James
Contact
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Music, She Wrote
3MBS' Festival celebrating women in music
Music, She Wrote is 3MBS's festival celebrating women in music. Since its inception in 2021 until 2024, as Artistic Director I was honoured to curate and present the finest local chamber musicians in diverse programs of classical, jazz, and folk music by female composers. It is our mission to tell women's stories in our own voices, and to show that inclusion never has to mean settling for second best.
Multitudes
Lewis Luman Cross (American, 1864–1951) Passenger Pigeons, c. 1900. Oil on canvas, 78 5/8 x 132 inches. Grand Rapids Art Museum, Gift of Ruth Skwarek in memory of Elsa and Henry Mueller, 1983.1.19. Image courtesy of Grand Rapids Art Museum.
Our world is filled with contradictions: technology affords us the opportunity to be the most connected we’ve ever been, yet we are the loneliest society that has lived. We proudly say we are a global, multicultural community, and yet there are barriers everywhere we turn. Our own identities are fractured, containing multitudes, yet struggling to create a single whole.Multitudes is a response and an antidote to these breakdowns in connection. Storytelling is one of humanity’s greatest tools; my vision is to tell my own story through live creation, active participation, and genuine, vulnerable sharing of an intimate space with collaborators and audience.Multitudes involves the creation of four new works through collaborative composition and improvisation. Each will be based on one of Judith Wright’s bird poems, which my mother introduced to me, along with a love of birds themselves.
Album
Multitudes the album will be released in November 2025 on CD, digital download, and a special limited run of vinyl!All made in Australia and released on the Tassie-based VDB label, keep your eyes peeled for it just in time for Christmas :)
Black Cockatoos
with Donald Nicolson
Donald and I share a fascination with the combination of ancient and modern music and instruments. Together we’ll explore that fusion to create a work for baroque viola and electronics. The viola’s sound is beautifully imperfect, and the baroque viola goes even further—full of profound intimacy and humanity. Judith Wright’s Black Cockatoos evokes an urgent wildness that lends itself perfectly to gut strings and electronics.
Passenger Pigeons
with Bowerbird Collective
Simone Slattery (violin) and Anthony Albrecht (cello) of Bowerbird Collective are outstanding examples of musical activists, combining research of our most endangered birds with captivating music of the highest quality, and have toured their acclaimed show Where Song Began throughout Australia and internationally. This collaboration will allow me to explore my own love of environment and combine it with my music-making.
Migrant Swift
with Mindy Meng Wang
Mindy champions the fusion of Chinese traditional and Western art music. I have spent my entire life trying to find a way to express my mixed Chinese heritage, having been brought up with little Chinese influence, and no language. By working with Mindy, I will finally be able to bring my cultural heritage in touch with my music making.
Night Herons
with Emily Sheppard
Emily and I have been friends and colleagues for over ten years, and have an instinctive improvisational connection, combining folk and classical styles. Playing with her is a joyous experience, and so is playing her music—I released her work Aftermath as a music video in 2021, and have performed it many times in concerts. Night Herons captures an ephemeral quality of wonder, which characterises my musical relationship with Emily.
Wattleseed Ensemble
Wattleseed Ensemble's music is an invitation to intimacy; to the rawness of bowed strings and eucalypt forest; to connection.We weave together music of the baroque period with folk music and contemporary Australian music in a confluence of styles, finding cohesion in the telling of a story. these stories always take us back to our scrappy, beautiful, astonishing Aussie environment.Formed in 2020 by violist Katie Yap, Wattleseed has performed all over Victoria with Musica Viva Australia, the Port Fairy Spring Music Festival, and the Melbourne Recital Centre (to name a few).In 2023, violinist Meg Cohen joined Katie as co-artistic director, and together they've begun education outreach to regional Victoria, and in 2025 sees them tour to South Australia and around Victoria.
Croissants & Whiskey
Combining four of Melbourne’s most versatile and in demand musicians, prog-baroque quartet Croissants and Whiskey brings a new energy to old instruments.
An unconventional blend of Harpsichord, G Violone, Baroque Viola, and Recorders creates new and unexpected timbres, blending the sonorous with the sharp, and making the old new again. Performing both baroque and modern compositions, Croissants and Whiskey is currently commissioning new works from diverse Australian voices, including an upcoming recording of Elizabeth Younan's The Fertile Crescent for the ABC Composer Commissioning Fund.
Formed during 2020’s stage 4 lockdown, Croissants and Whiskey is named from the refreshing libations at those first joyous post-pandemic rehearsals. Joy Lee, Ryan Williams, Katie Yap, and Miranda Hill bring musicality, focus, and humour to their work, making any performance one not to miss.
Individually, Joy, Ryan, Katie, and Miranda have performed with Australia’s elite ensembles, including: Elision, Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, Australian World Orchestra, Inland Concerts, Astra, Melbourne Baroque Orchestra, Arcko, Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra, Homophonic! Genesis Baroque, and the major Symphony and Opera Orchestras.