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Ihlara McIndoe is one of eight Resident Composers selected to participate in the 2026 Mizzou International Composers Festival. MICF Resident Ensemble Alarm Will Sound will perform her composition Sleepwards, but aware meanwhile, at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 25, at Columbia’s Missouri Theatre. The concert is free and open to the public.
Ihlara McIndoe is a composer from Ōtepoti Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand, currently based in New York City. Her compositional work draws on themes of exploration and preservation to investigate artistic ecologies and creative modes of (re)thinking, (re)making and remembering. Her work has been performed in Aotearoa and internationally by artists including Mark Menzies, Johanna Vargas, Mayumi Miyata, Nanae Yoshimura, Gabriela Glapska, The Rhythm Method Quartet, Ensemble Court-Circuit, Les Métaboles, Multilaterale, Duo Nessi, the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, NZ National Youth Orchestra, and Stroma; and presented at festivals and venues including the Artistic Research Creation Opus (France), Festival de Royaumont (France), Bendigo International Festival for Exploratory Music (Australia), CubaDupa (Aotearoa), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada), the Composers Conference (USA), and the US National Flute Association Convention.
Her collaborations with the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust have shared the sounds of Antarctica with communities through music in various settings, including concert music, installations, educational workshops, and documentary. Her 2025 work for string quartet and voices, of coral and foam, composed for The Rhythm Method Quartet, received the SOUNZ Contemporary Award Te Tohu Auaha, New Zealand’s premier award for contemporary music composition. Her recent collaboration with Ensemble Semblance was part of the Radio France Création mondiale – Alla breve commissioning series, curated by Anne Montaron.
Ihlara completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Otago, where she studied composition with Anthony Ritchie, Peter Adams, Chris Gendall, and Dylan Lardelli. She holds an MA Musicology from McGill University, and is currently undertaking her DMA in Composition at Columbia University, where she is studying with Zosha Di Castri, Marcos Balter, George Lewis, and Georg Friedrich Haas.
We recently chatted with her via email.
What is your musical background? When and how did you begin composing?
I grew up playing the piano, and as a teenager I got a job playing in the evenings at a cafe. I’d need to be playing for a couple of hours each night and didn’t have enough repertoire to fill the time or the sight-reading skills to whip out music I was unfamiliar with, so often I’d end up improvising (probably quite poorly) to fill the set out. I found myself coming back to similar musical materials each time, working and reworking them in the process of improvisation, until eventually, they’d form into fixed pieces. I experimented with methods to notate my ideas, which eventually led to enrolling in a composition class when I went to uni (at Otago University, where I studied with Anthony Ritchie and Peter Adams), and from there I was hooked!
How did you hear about MICF?
I think one of my colleagues told me about MICF originally. I checked out videos from the festival on Youtube and was struck and inspired by the breadth of incredible musical voices presented. It seemed like a really exciting project to be part of!
Tell us about your piece that will be performed at MICF. What should we listen for?
I’m interested in exploring hidden or obscured utterances, and the entanglement of private and collective consciousness within my composition practice. As part of this, I often embed fragments of poetry within my scores, which are unspoken but inform the contours of musical lines (most directly informing rhythm, but also implicating gesture, articulation, and tone more broadly). This work for MICF draws upon the gorgeous words of Ursula Bethell (1874-1945), who is known for her landscape poetry which confronts tensions of space and place, both physically (from her perspective as a British settler in Aotearoa New Zealand) and spiritually (in the disjunctions between religious and everyday experience). I’m experimenting with something precarious and a bit vulnerable – I never really know how the invitations for interpretation of prose will manifest in musical form, but I find that really exciting, and am grateful for the generosity and curiosity that performing artists bring to the process of exploration. Within this work, I invite the audience to listen for the emergence of a collective unfurling.
What does it mean for you to work with an ensemble like Alarm Will Sound?
Working with Alarm Will Sound is tremendously exciting. As I mentioned, one of the things that I find so striking about MICF is the breadth of compositional styles that are presented, and I hugely admire how Alarm Will Sound is so open, enthusiastic, and dedicated to so many different ways of music making.
What do you hope to learn from your MICF experience?
I work a lot with unstable sounds and precarious modes of communication, and I’m always seeking to refine my craft in ways which allow for further risk-taking and vulnerability. This is a process of learning that is hugely informed by the skill and creativity of the performers and composers I work alongside, so I’m very excited to attend MICF to make music and learn together.
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