Salina Fisher (born 1993)
Salina Fisher is from Christchurch, New Zealand. She graduated from the New Zealand School of Music and then the Manhattan School of Music, where she earned a Master of Music in Composition. She is currently based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington.
Salina Fisher’s website states:
Her highly evocative music often draws on her Japanese heritage, as well as a fascination with the natural world. With a background as a violinist, Salina finds lyricism in unusual timbres and extended tonalities, with a sensitivity to detail and gesture. She is particularly interested in collaboration, and has worked closely with practitioners of taonga pūoro [traditional musical instruments of the Māori people of New Zealand], Japanese instruments, ceramics, and film.
Salina Fisher’s mostly composes for orchestras and chamber ensembles. Whether in small or large forms, her compositions are sensitively constructed and subtly structured, creating sonic landscapes that are fascinating, compelling, and moving.
Her 2015 orchestral work Rainphase (2015) (the composer has said) “draws on characteristics of water as rain: its shape and shapelessness, transparency and density, energy and calm, and its capacity for reflection in both a literal and emotional sense":
The composer appears on stage at the end of the performance.
Her most recent orchestral composition seems to be Murmuring Light from 2019. The title alludes to a light installation, which itself is based on murmuration — the large flight formations of starlings.
Salina Fisher writes:
While birds can symbolize individual freedom, in a murmuration they find safety in numbers, sensing each other’s direction and moving collectively. In Murmuring Light, I explore this delicate balance between the individual and the group. Through various musical parameters, the distinction between ‘individual’ and ‘group’ is heightened and blurred, in a continuous shift of light.
Here is her 2020 piano trio Kintsugi, which is named after the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold:
The composer writes:
I am personally drawn to kintsugi as a metaphor for embracing ‘brokenness’ and imperfection as a source of strength. This piece for piano trio is my expression and exploration of kintsugi, and involves musical fragmentation, fragility, mending, and finding beauty in the ‘cracks’.