About me

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Extended Bio

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Performance / recording

Composition

Musical Direction

Other work

Quin Thomson is a performer, recording artist, composer, arranger, sound designer, musical director and vocal coach. Their musical career spans more than thirty years (beginning with a solo debut in Donald Hollierʼs contemporary opera, In Dulci Jubilo, at the age of 10) and several countries.

Performance / Recording

In Australia, Quin has performed with the Song Company and e21, and, during an eight year stint in Europe, with Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and Choir, the Netherlands Bach Society, the Egidius College (including on their Leiden Choir Book CD series) the Netherlands Radio Choir, Trigon, Musica Poetica (including on the CD “Musicalische Frühlings-Früchte”, released on the Challenge label) and Musica Universalis.

Since their return to Australia in 2011, Quin has appeared on ABC FM, Compass and Back Roads (they also appear in the Back Roads book as a featured story), at a contemporary performance with the TSO Chorus Extreme in the Spiegeltent, in various performances with Baroque ensemble Sequenza, performing original work at the Cygnet Festival, in the Australian premiere of Carl Rütti‘s Requiem (with Hobart Chamber Orchestra / Loose Canon Chamber Singers), in the world premieres of Ralph Middenway’s Sun of Umbria and Dark River, in the Festival of Voices (also as a music director, composer and workshop facilitator), as a soloist for Tasmanian Chorale / Argyle Orchestra, Singers of Southern Tasmania, Derwent Symphony Orchestra, Hobart Chamber Orchestra, and Lincoln Singers. They toured a New Work program (also composing a song cycle for that tour) with Sequenza as part of the 2017 Ten Days on the Island festival. Further afield, Quin’s appearances have included a tour to New Zealand performing Monteverdi’s Vespers, regular appearances at the Ballarat Goldfields and Newman College Advent Festivals, and concerts with La Compania,  Ludovico’s Band and e21.

They are a founding member of Sequenza and Sonus Lux ensembles, and are part of a forthcoming new opera, Emergenc/y, in development by Felicity Wilcox.

Composition

Quin’s compositional debut was who am, a four part piece written for the Canberra Children’s Choir and premiered in 1998, when Quin was 14. Quin continued composing throughout their secondary schooling and on into their twenties, with various mass settings performed by the Choir of Newman College and women’s trio Triptych – their inaugural CD is described in Limelight Magazine as “exquisite, near-flawless performances”.

Quin moved to the Netherlands in order to take up an offer to study Sonology at the Royal Conservatoire the Hague. While in the Netherlands, Quin’s debut CD, meditatio / xv, attracted Australia Council New Work funding – with Grand Master of Shakuhachi, Riley Lee, Quin created a CD of Gregorian Chant, Zen Meditations, and new works with a found-sound-based live electroacoustic element forming a “third voice” informed by the intersection of these two different but complementary traditions.

Since returning to Australia, Quin has resumed composing, with an increasing emphasis on advocacy through making. Commissions include work for ensemble Sequenza, to open the Bonfire Ceremony at the 2015 Festival of Voices (performed by CoCheol), and for QTas Choir as part of the Queer Narratives: Story to Song and SoundOut projects with support from Tasmanian Regional Arts and Events Tasmania. Their work Hemispheares featured in a project headed up by Kon Koukias in the Netherlands in 2016. In 2017, Sequenza premiered Birdsong, a cycle commissioned for the quartet with the support of Tasmanian Regional Arts, at five performances around Tasmania. Quin’s full-length work for brass and vocal double quintet,  A Tasmanian Requiem, written in collaboration with Greg Lehman, Frances Butler and puralia meenamatta/Jim Everett (libretto) and Julie Gough (visual component), produced by Frances Butler with generous support from Arts Tasmania and the Australia Council, premiered to high critical acclaim in April 2018. Quin’s latest commissions have been for Tasmanian Youth Orchestra Chorale, Canberra’s Oriana Chorale as part of the fascinating, ekphrastic Text/ure project, Homophonic! Ensemble as part of their Respect series, and in their role as Van Diemen’s Band’s 2025 Composer in Residence.

Musical Direction

Quin currently directs Van Diemen’s Voices. Past directorships have included the Tasmanian Youth Orchestra‘s Chorale and Chamber Orchestras, QTas Choir, the Sing Australia choirs, the University of Tasmania‘s Conservatorium Vocal Ensemble, and Swansong Choir, as well as guest musical direction appearances with Sonus Lux ensemble, Festival of Voices, Dark Mofo, the Cygnet Festival, and Loose Canon Chamber Singers.

Other work

Experimental work includes site-responsive endurance improvisations (including Bowerbird 2021, supported by the City of Hobart), immersive meditative work incorporating Cymatics through Salamanca Arts Centre’s HyPe Program (2019), the development of the Electrogurdy, a novel controller/instrument to facilitate real-time digital signal processing of found sound with the support of RANT Arts (2021), and a forthcoming online long-form aleatoric composition informed by local nipaluna weather data.

With the training and assistance of Creative Partnerships Australia’s Match program, Quin successfully raised over $16000 for the acquisition of a violone, lute and extended percussion set for Sequenza Ensemble. They won a beginner scholarship to the 2017 Easter Viol school. Quin was part of the 2020 Tarraleah residency program coordinated by Tasmania Performs. In 2021 they won a Creative Support grant through Arts Tasmania in order to acquire an 5 string electric upright bass.

In March 2025, Quin performed their last concert as a Soprano ahead of medical gender transition. The funds raised by their Swansong performance were used to fund top surgery.