“It wasn’t just a piece that I’m putting out there with just my name; it’s a piece I’m making for two very specific performers, with those performers. It felt like a strong step on the path of exploring expressive, musical material — with as much rigour as I can summon.”
Luka Venter
Luka Venter is a composer and conductor from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand). Luka’s work has a consistent and fundamental emphasis on weaving the ecological and the musical into a single voice — a praxis explored through instrumental, vocal, and orchestral works. Luka’s music has been performed internationally in the UK, Brazil, and Aotearoa, at the Barbican Centre (Lanternfish), St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and Café OTO, and with Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble and the International Viola Congress. Luka is currently Composer-in-Residence with the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, and they are a former winner of the NZSO Todd Corporation Young Composer Award. They are alum of the Britten-Pears Young Artist Programme 2023; as a conductor, they were the Composers Conference 2025 New Music Conductor Fellow, and served as assistant/cover conductor on George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Picture a day like this at the Royal Ballet & Opera. Luka earned a first class MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Julian Philips and Stephen Plaice, and at Te Kōkī (New Zealand School of Music) at Te Herenga Waka (Victoria University of Wellington).
In July 2025, Luka’s orchestral work glacier, commissioned by the NZSO National Youth Orchestra, had its premiere at the Michael Fowler Centre, Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) and was also performed in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland). Following the premiere, we caught up with Luka over Zoom about ecological writing, clarity and rigour, visceral entanglement, and journeys in collaboration…
Note: Throughout this interview, PRXLUDES and Luka Venter will be using the Māori terms for concepts relating to Māori culture and Aotearoa (New Zealand) more widely.
Zyggy/PRXLUDES: Hi Luka! Thanks for joining me today. Your latest orchestral work, glacier, was recently commissioned by the NZSO National Youth Orchestra — tell me a bit about the work…
Luka Venter: It’s a piece I’ve been wanting to do for a few years, and I’ve been thinking about it for a very long time. I recently said to my partner that I’m actually so glad I didn’t get it the first time I applied with this concept, a few years ago — because I don’t think I quite had the chops to do it properly.
My practice engages extensively with the ecological. I think I’ve always been extremely interested in making music that responds to the natural world, but I think it’s something that’s particularly come into view across the last few years. (experience, and the perspective that gives you, is always so helpful). But as with vocal music — which is one of my big, big things — I cared about doing it well so much. Being a singer, I knew how tricky it could be to do it well. The same with anything ecological: I could see the complexity of the task, and it took me a long time to have the skills and the ability to discern how to do it really rigorously. That’s why I didn’t — until recently — follow through on some of these compositional pursuits that I’ve wanted to do since the very beginning, like: writing for voice, writing opera, writing much more ecologically informed music.
You mentioned it taking a long time to feel “ready” to tackle these themes properly in your work — did you see elements of this sort of ecological thinking develop in your earlier pieces, too?
Looking back, I realise that even my very earliest pieces all in some way connected into the natural world — but in some ways, my early attempts to write music that responded to the natural world always felt simplistic to me, in a way I couldn’t quite unlock. At the start of your journey as a composer, it’s a very long process of gathering all your technical resources in your toolbox — a thousand different ways of looking at material, at music-making in general. I like some of the early pieces that I’m thinking of — there were some beautiful harmonic and timbral colours — but I could see it wasn’t genuinely a “Luka” response to the ecological, and that there was this gnawing disconnect for me between my sonic/musical materials and the things I was responding to.
In some of my early vocal writing, as well; I could also feel this underlying disconnect between the text and my musical materials. So for many, many years, I didn’t do much of either of those things — which I was internally crying out to do — because I didn’t quite understand how the two could be intertwined.
There are good and bad things to this approach. Rather than giving it a go, for a long time, I spent so much time exploring and thinking about things quietly… I think I instinctively began to feel that if I’m gonna do it, I care about it so deeply that then I want to do it with as much clarity and rigour as I can.
Of course. Do you feel like you had some sort of responsibility, musically, to do your ideas justice?
Absolutely, especially ecologically — and increasingly so. With vocal music, there’s a responsibility to the text — the nuance, the complexity of the text — but with anything ecological, you’re not just writing music about a pretty thing; you have a huge responsibility if you’re making work that responds to the natural world.
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To talk about glacier — how did you set about responding to the natural world within the musical ideas? How did you capture those, musically and ecologically?
When I wrote the proposal for the piece last year, I had some very strong instinctual ideas for colours, shapes, some of the gesturality of the piece… I knew I wanted to use very open, naturally occurring resonances. But I wasn’t quite sure how cleanly those instincts aligned with what’s actually happening within a glacier scientifically.
I did a lot of research into the scientific side of it — doing the most rigorous research I could into the morphology, the particles, of this thing the work was about — then drawing out of that [the] natural processes that could map onto musical processes. The piece was really excavating the processes that go into shaping glaciers, how they move. What it is, on a granular level, that means the ice is that incredibly vibrant blue. And then translating that into musical processes: sonic colours, a gestural logic for the piece.
One of those processes was the naturally cascading morphology of glaciers. Snow falls, and thousands of tiny snowflakes fall onto each other and compact into thicker and thicker layers of ice, that then cascade down a mountainside… Immediately, that gave me some very clear parallels with the gestural potential of a full orchestra — where you have all these layers of instruments of different families, but you have registral layers as well. The potential for those to cascade across each other became the starting point for the whole first third of the piece.
That’s fascinating — how did the piece develop from there?
Feeding on from that… The snow compacting, and becoming more and more compressed. The more you sift through the layers of a glacier, the ice gets more and more compressed, which leads to that vivid blue ice. That process of compression — landing on that in the research — was incredibly useful, musically. There were so many ways I could apply that: by setting up rhythmic phrases and compressing those, having slow material and superimposing similar [faster] material on top of those layers. [And] by physically compressing the sound! There’s a lot of horn in the piece — I love the horn. The tension of a stopped horn… There are quite a few mutes the trumpets are playing [as well]; in the middle of the piece, they’re playing practice mutes, but with a lot of force — so you get this compressed, bright sound shining through the centre of the orchestra.
That process of compression — if you start with larger note values, and it gets smaller and smaller — ultimately, what you’re left with is very fast pulsing. Which is also something that relates physically to what happens inside of glaciers; if you’re listening to field recordings of them, there’s quite a lot of cracking and popping happening inside the ice. That “pulsing” motif comes in towards the middle of the piece — when, in my mind, we’ve sunk through the layers of [the] glacier, almost against the bedrock at the bottom, where you get the most ancient ice. We’re coming into contact with geological time. That’s the one point in the piece where time does completely stop — a minute and a half of completely unconducted material — where that pulsing motif becomes extremely important.
At that point in the piece, you have the percussionist playing these stones — I understand these are stones that are actually sourced from glaciers?
I incorporated three pairs of stones that were sourced from streams of meltwater, at the bases of two glaciers in Te Waipounamu — the South Island. Those glaciers were Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere [ed. Franz Josef Glacier] — which translates to “the tears of Hine Hukatere” — and Rob Roy [Glacier]. At the mid-point of the piece, the still inner heart of it, those stones are really incorporated into the material — [a] very gentle, precisely notated passage, where you hear the three pairs of stones — coupled with a trio of flutes doing these pulsed overblowing gestures. I think that moment is the clearest example of how I was able to distill those morphological process — everything that’s happening inside the ice — into material that isn’t just a “soundscape”, or just “textural”, but that really had a musical logic. I was really trying to give the most expressive voice to the ecological source material.
Were there any particular methods of creation — outside of composition — that inspired your approach?
During the process of the piece, I couldn’t help but relate some of what I was exploring to the writings of Alice Oswald. A lot of her writing is very ecologically informed. She often goes through processes of rigorously, forensically observing her subject matter — waking every morning to scrutinise the minutiae of how the sun rises upon the horizon in a long poem about the dawn. In an interview about her work, she talks about her materials responding to the natural world work in a way that mimics how the natural world itself actually works. So in Nobody (a piece about the sea), for instance, her text matches the slippery, protean quality that the sea itself has — syntax that no longer follows a human logic, because why should it? I really wanted [my] material to tread similar ground; and with anything that I created musically, to be able to make sure I can draw a very clear line between any decision I’m making and what the natural processes are.
There’s something I love about that idea. Kind of working “with” the natural world on its own terms, or deconstructing how humans have historically viewed the natural world…
That’s an uncanny observation. I very actively was aware of a lineage of pieces quote-unquote “about” the natural world. Pieces from “man’s perspective” on [the] natural world. Like the Alpine Symphony, even a lot of pieces by Sibelius — all beautiful works. There’s so much art about humans looking at the natural world, but the natural world nevertheless exists regardless of whether we observe it or not.
We have these stereotypes of things moving at a “glacial pace”. But glaciers have carved the surface of our planet in so many ways. Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere, for instance, can move around 7 metres a day — and that’s however many metric tons of ice, frankly, moving a huge distance. Even the shape of Edinburgh: the reason why there’s this rocky mound in the middle is because glaciers have completely carved the stone around it. The force, and the motion, of glaciers — that’s what I wanted to capture. I didn’t want to capture a human stereotype of it. I wanted to go, forensically, vividly, into the ice, and bring that to life through music. Like a non-anthropocentric perspective.
It comes back to my profound and daily belief that humans are inextricable from the natural world. Being from Aotearoa [New Zealand] specifically, I have so much of the natural world within such easy reach; I look out the window and I hear so many types of native birds. The valley that I live in is one of the only places on the planet where certain species of native bird are actually breeding in the wild — but yet, I’m a 25 minute walk to the centre of the city. It’s such an intimate part of my life on a daily basis; not just a theoretical thing.
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You spent a number of years living in London, as well, when you studied at Guildhall. Did your time in the UK shift your perspective on how you engage with your environment?
The end of 2023 is when I moved back. Coming back to Aotearoa after a few years living in the UK, I thought a lot about my practice, what I was doing, where I wanted to go next. I made a very conscious decision in the early few months of going back, to really situate everything I did creatively in this whenua — in this land.
One of the first pieces you worked on when returning from the UK was ‘puāwai’, for viola and taonga pūoro [ed. traditional Māori instruments] — can you tell me a bit about how that piece first came about?
Pretty soon after moving back — the very beginning of [20]24 — there was a waiata [song] by Hirini Melbourne, who’s a wonderful musician. The waiata is called ‘Pīpīwharauroa’, which is the name of a bird that comes out every spring; a shining cuckoo. My mind [then] really fixated on the word puāwai — which is a verb that translates roughly to “to bloom”, or “to burst into bloom”. I really thought forensically about the process when something is bursting into bloom, when a bud is germinating. Not just superficially — as something opening up — but a pressure exerted from the inside of this plant, that pushes itself into being, essentially. Poetically, this also connects into Māori cosmology, but aligned very intimately with my interest in ecology, also.
Coincidentally, a friend of mine — who’s a violist — posted online asking if anyone had any works for viola relating to te reo Māori [ed. the Māori language], or te ao Māori — the Māori worldview. And we got in touch, and I said “very strangely, I do!”. We made the decision to reshape my idea to make it work for viola and taonga pūoro. I worked with Ariana Tikao (Kāi Tahu), and the violist was Sophia Acheson (Ngāpuhi).
The taonga pūoro have quite a rich cultural history. Tell me about the process of collaborating with Ariana, and writing for her instruments?
We met initially for a long session where — before we even talked about the piece, or the material — we just got to know each other. Then when we talked about the concept of the piece, I mentioned my interest in the word puāwai, and she couldn’t help but relate it to her own experiences, both as a player of taonga pūoro and as a woman: the processes of childbirth, the sense of physically opening up during childbirth.
The process became collaborative; not only in a musical sense, but conceptually. Ariana’s thoughts [then] steered the piece us clearly towards specific instruments. All taonga pūoro players have a vast collection of instruments: percussive ones, gourds, flutes, swung instruments that produce pitch, that produce white noise. All sorts.
What kinds of instruments did you decide to use for the piece?
Ariana related our conversation about the word puāwai, and its associations for her with processes of childbirth, with the pūmotomoto, firstly. All taonga pūoro instruments [are] made from natural materials, and the pūmotomoto in particular has very intimate connections with childbirth and newborns: the word pūmotomoto means both the name of this instrument, but also refers to the fontanelle on an infant’s skull. When that is still soft shortly after birth, a pūmotomoto might be played over the fontanelle, in order to impart cultural knowledge into this infant.
The [other] instruments we used were the poiāwhiowhio — small gourds on cords that you swing. Not only do they produce a bit of pitch, but if you hit the groove just right, the rhythms really lock in on the poiāwhioahio, and they whistle with this really electric pulse rhythm. It’s really extraordinary. Then the kōauau pongaīhu — a beautiful, mellow, quite sonorous nose flute.
The term taonga pūoro literally translates to “singing treasures”. What did you have to bear in mind, compositionally, when working with a player of so many instruments, with such an important cultural history?
One of the main things I thought when I went into this process was: I’d just done such intense, rigorous training in collaborative working methods at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and had had a bit of time to process everything I learned. So I went into the process telling myself: if Ariana has thoughts that don’t immediately align with my own preconceived ideas, I’m going to go into this collaboration with a complete sense of trust, and allow that process to be generative, and allow it to be really two-sided. One example of this is that I don’t think I had even come into contact with the pūmotomoto before, but trusted and followed Ariana’s judgement — and the use of the pūmotomoto then fundamentally shaped not only the first third of the piece, but the form on the whole.
If you think about the intimate social functions of the pūmotomoto… It, correspondingly, has quite a small range — only a few pitches in quite a mellow alto register. Initially, that was compositionally quite challenging to incorporate and balance with the viola; but ultimately, it gave me a clear way into the piece, and showed me that clearly the piece needs to start from somewhere intimate in order to bloom into something more vibrant.
Connecting into that — something else I always needed to find solutions for, was the fundamental question of how to sonically and gesturally interweave instruments from such radically different traditions and playing styles. One crucial question was: how do I incorporate the microtonal nature of so many of these instruments with the more equal-temperament way that we play Western instruments? How do I use these very different instruments to create a structural arc where they’re both musically inextricable from one another — how do I balance writing very sensitively and avoid overpowering Ariana’s instruments with the viola? Taonga pūoro are often quite delicate instruments; although some of them can be quite powerful. Those were challenges, for sure.
Do you feel like those constraints helped you in the compositional process?
As always, some of those challenges led to a really compelling process for me. The fact that I wasn’t doing it alone helps, as well — it wasn’t just a piece that I’m putting out there with just my name, it’s a piece I’m making for two very specific performers, with those performers. It also felt like a strong step on the path of exploring expressive, musical material — with as much rigour as I can summon.
There was nothing that went into the viola part that didn’t, in some way, come from Ariana’s taonga pūoro. Gesturally, you can see how they correspond. The swinging gesture of the poiāwhioahio that I mentioned… The circularity of that gesture really gave birth to equally circular gestures in the viola. There are moments with these big arpeggiated florid movements which correspond to what the poiāwhioahio is doing; there’s one moment in the piece where the swinging of the poiāwhioahio and the playing of the viola slow down in tandem with each other, and speed up again.
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Earlier, you talked about having a sense of responsibility when writing ecologically-focused music. It sounds to me like a lot of the ways you’ve been navigating this piece also focus around this kind of responsibility…
Hugely. Historically, there have been not-great examples of composers writing pieces that use taonga pūoro in their music, but the process maybe doesn’t go much deeper than that. [But] I can think of composers who’ve done a profoundly moving, creatively compelling job of weaving them together. My friend, Salina Fisher, has done a very beautiful job throughout her collaborations with taonga pūoro players.
But, absolutely — you’ve got a huge responsibility. The pieces that you’re writing (hopefully in collaboration), as a composer of art music, you’re writing for contexts and spaces that to a large extent privilege you. So you have to write in a way that opens space for those instruments, which a) are often quite delicate; and b) depending on the player, [are] not notated, and therefore also don’t relate to time in the same way as much of Western music does. Maybe it’s context-dependent; but mostly, the way I approach it, you don’t notate it. But I try and write as intricately with those instruments as I can, taking into account all of the broader resonances of these instruments. Each of them [taonga pūoro] has its own whakapapa — genealogy — as so many things in te ao Māori do. And so you have to write in a way that takes all of that into account.
To facilitate the most supportive process for the taonga pūoro players you’re working with as individuals, you, as a composer, should be creating space for their input and their voice. You really have to do a lot of taking yourself out of the limelight, as a composer. But then my work, and background, is very notation-based and very notationally precise; so going into any of these collaborations, I have to then try to also put a lot of that to one side — and place my technique at the service of the taonga pūoro and the player I’m working with, rather than the other way around. So many pākehā [ed. New Zealanders of European descent] have engaged with te ao Māori superficially or destructively — so you have a human responsibility, as well as a cultural one, a historical one.
Tell me a bit about how your work engages with te ao Māori [the Māori worldview]. Do you feel like that’s related to practices of decolonisation more broadly, and is that something you explore in your practice?
Individually, it’s a process of working to learn the language — which is a process of years. Not just learning the language in a utilitarian sense, but learning the incredible symbolism and poetry of the language, about all aspects of tikanga — Māori culture. Learning, intimately, about the history — generally and specifically to where you are — which is challenging when colonists don’t always like to keep records of what they’ve tried to eradicate in various places, or what they’ve pushed aside. Familiarising yourself with the local history.
For me, that looks a lot like learning really intimately about the natural world. That’s a crucial thing that the colonial mindset seems to gloss over, or distinctly not care about: local plants and animals, and the histories and whakataukī [ed. proverbs] associated with them. If I’m sitting in my studio, and I can hear native birdsong, being able to pick out which one it is. The process of my work [is] digging deep into the soil, the ice, of where I am, and there’s a seamless (and necessary) connection between my creative work and where I am in the world.
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We’ve not yet touched on your work with text — when writing vocal work, or work setting text, do you tend to lean towards these processes of finding connections?
One of the early predecessors — even though it’s only two years ago — of the projects we’ve just been talking about is Lanternfish, my chamber opera with David Bottomley. There was so much technically that I was getting to grips with, making an actual opera for the first time after wanting to do it forever. -laughs- That [opera] is about a marine biologist, working with the mesopelagic — the twilight zone — particularly studying myctophids (lanternfish).
Looking back, there were small hints of where my practice might go, and where it now has gone — some early examples of me trying to engage directly with ecological source materials, and translate those into musical material. One subtle example is a few points in the chamber opera where I took transcriptions of field recordings from the deep sea, and compositionally wove those into the instrumental writing for the ensemble.
One thing that struck me in Lanternfish was the opening — where you couldn’t tell whether the ensemble was diegetic, or occurring “within” the piece, or just orchestration…
Most of that is a distillation of a single chord, that gave rise to all the material. Well, the first line anyone sings in the opera is “Listening…for echoes from below” — but this is sung while the character is actually actively listening to and observing the deep sea. In the journey of this character’s psychology, it has deeper symbolic resonances as well — so I think in a sense, it’s both! Compositionally, the material for the opening is drawn out of the single chord that much of the opera came from — a chord which connects deeply with that character, her journey, and her connection with the deep sea.
In some ways, [that] happened with glacier as well. I talked a lot with a photographer who’d been to a lot of the glaciers I mentioned, and that photographer that sent me a lot of field recordings from his phone. One morning during my work, I came across some of his photography of viscerally blue ice and (I don’t want it to sound like I was struck by divine inspiration) but really this chord leapt out at me. It has this quality of these naturally occurring partials, but they’re registrally compressed — in a way it gave the chord real chromatic potential I could play with. A brightness that corresponded to that bright blue ice.
Speaking of your work with text — you’re currently collaborating with librettist Olivia Bell on some new large-scale works. What you’ve been exploring with Olivia?
When Olivia and I met during our time at the Guildhall, we both were so struck with coming into contact with someone else who had such a vivid interest in ancient history. We both have very strong interests in archaeology. When I was a kid — long before I got into music — I desperately wanted to become an archaeologist one day. Maybe financially, it’s for the best that I didn’t; although then I became a musician… -laughs-
Since the early days of knowing each other, [we’ve] been interested in learning where that might lead. We’re both trained singers, we’re both experienced writers — both of us have multidisciplinary practices — and we enjoy finding ways of working where we can allow those to overlap and intertwine. That feels like an ecological way of working, and this also connects into our mutual interests.
Tell me a bit about some of the projects you’ve been starting to put together…
One of the projects where we really explored that is [in] its early stages — a piece for mixed choir, violin, and viola. We talked very excitedly about the discoveries that have been made in Norway by archaeologists; as glaciers are receding, [they] have been discovering more and more artefacts from various periods, being uncovered by the recession of the ice. It’s only through the actions of industrial, contemporary humanity, that these ancient bodies of ice recede to reveal ancient objects, ancient remnants of our past. There’s a complex interaction between the anthropocene and the ancient geological world. Olivia and I are creating a collaborative text that we’re developing together, giving voice to the glacier and the fact that they’re “yawning open” and revealing our own history to us as humans.
And over the coming year or two, we’re developing an operatic project about rewilding: exploring, on a visceral level, the interconnection between humans and the natural world around them. The process of becoming physically entwined with the natural world — and connecting with the rhythms, sounds… The bodies of animals and plants around you. The phrase Olivia and I have used is “visceral entanglement”. That’s something we’re very interested in.
We’ve talked about decolonisation and native species going hand-in-hand. Decolonisation isn’t just a human thing, but also a question going back to the original language of the land, ecologically; the original rhythms, cycles, and species, which human colonial actions have often disrupted, or eradicated. That’s another way in which they all are so entwined. Through contact with te ao Māori, and concepts of whakapapa — ancestry — which is so intimately familiar and intimately recounted in te ao Māori; and ecologically, where we’re at now… There’s a huge amount of unlearning, or relearning, that needs to happen.
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Learn more about Luka and their practice at:
- https://www.lukaventer.com/
- https://sounz.org.nz/contributors/192?locale=en
- https://www.instagram.com/luka.venter/
References/Links:
- ‘Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere: The Tears of the Snow Maiden in Franz Josef Glacier’ (2023), Franz Josef Wilderness Tours
- Alice Oswald, Nobody (2019)
- Richard Strauss – ‘An Alpine Symphony’ (1915)
- Hirini Melbourne – ‘Pīpīwharauroa’ (2010)
- ‘Pūmotomoto’, Haumanu Collective
- ‘Poiāwhioahio’, Haumanu Collective
- ‘Kōauau Ponga Ihu’, Haumanu Collective
