Omniaqua – Music composition in the Museum

Omniaqua is a composition for mixed quintet by Julia Nadine Loukes Potter, inspired by three works of art featured in the 2017 Potter exhibition Not as the songs of other lands: 19th century Australian and American landscape painting. This new music composition reflects on three representations of water: calm and still in a small lake, fluid and flowing through a river, and playfully tossed and spraying against a rocky shore. These interpretations aim to encapsulate each painting through music, conjuring the atmospheres, forms and ideas presented in all three artworks.

Works of art referenced in the composition:

Thomas Doughty (1793–1856), In the Adirondacks, c. 1822–30, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift of Laurence and Ronnie Robbins

Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), Newburyport Marshes: Approaching storm, c. 1871, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

William Stanley Haseltine (1835–1900), Rocks at Nahant, 1864, oil on canvas, Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Julia Nadine Loukes Potter has a Bachelor of Music in Composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, where she studied with Katy Abbott Kvasnica, Kevin March, Christine McCombe and Elliott Gyger. Loukes Potter has a particular interest in writing music for visual art and for classical and contemporary dance, having studied ballet since the age of six. Together with her love for movement and beauty of melody, Potter seeks to create music with a sense of contour and flow.