Alex Turley is one of the most sought-after composers and musical collaborators of his generation, having worked with all of Australia's major orchestras and collaborated with a diverse group of artists including Ali McGregor, Banks, Ben Folds, Electric Fields, Emma Donovan, Eskimo Joe, Genesis Owusu, G Flip, the Hoodoo Gurus, Ngaiire, Paul Grabowsky and Rüfüs Du Sol. In 2024 he is undertaking a highly competitive Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship from the Forrest Research Foundation and the Layton Emerging Composer Fellowship from UNSW.
Known for projects that cross genre boundaries, Alex has recently co-composed Barra-roddjiba with members of all-woman rock band Ripple Effect and Kunibídji elders for the Darwin Symphony Orchestra (lauded by Limelight as an "innovative cross-cultural performance") as well as Agam, a 50-minute orchestral suite with Carnatic music collective Sangam which premiered at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. In 2022 his show with Electric Fields and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was described as an "effervescent, electronic neo-soul song cycle...sonically painted live by the limitless textures of the most profound musical organism" (Beat).
Alex's orchestral work City of Ghosts, written for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra when the composer was nineteen, was described as "an accessible, brilliant piece of music" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and possessing a "refined sense of texture and atmosphere" (Partial Durations), while the more recent chamber work Zero Sum Game was lauded as an "exciting aural landscape...alternatively driving and luxuriating, the young composer taking the compositional turns with ease" (Limelight).
Alex completed a Master of Music (Composition) at the Sydney Conservatorium with a research project investigating diverse approaches to musical temporality. This followed undergraduate studies in composition at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts with a First Class Honours Thesis investigating the work of Toru Takemitsu. He is the recipient of the Henderson Postgraduate Scholarship from the University of Sydney, John & Margaret Winstanley Award from WAAPA, an Edith Cowan Excellence Scholarship, a finalist in the APRA AMCOS Professional Development Awards and in 2021 won the Arcadia Winds Composition Prize.
