Bio

Born into a family that played folk music around campfires, Jenny graduated from the Victorian College of The Arts/Melbourne University in 1992 with viola as her principal instrument.  Working with the Australian Philharmonic Orchestra until her passion for alternative violin techniques took over, she then studied at the Indian Academy of Music Melbourne, Willy Clancy Summer School Ireland and private tuition in Finland with Aarto Jarvela (Sibelius Folk Academy Helsinki).

The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Symphony Symphony have engaged her as a Norwegian Hardanger/Irish fiddle soloist whilst her exploration of Indian, Celtic & Scandinavian violin styles gained her invitations to perform at the Rudolstadt Tanz & Volk Festival Germany, Summer Viva Festival Italy and Sidmouth Folk Festival UK. With worl music ensemble AKIN she produced and composed an albums that earned them an ARIA award nomination. Establishing her own record company,  Fydle Records in 2003, she released solo albums which were chosen for Melbourne Herald-Sun's top 10 CD picks of 2006, top five albums for airplay on community stations by AMRAP 2007, a Golden Fiddle Award and inclusion on ABC Classic Drive CD 2011. When Grammy award winning music producer and composer François Tétaz (Gotye, Wolf Creek) wanted an improvising violinist to play on his film score for the feature film Rogue (2007) it was Jenny he called. She has also worked with Lior, Tim Rogers, Bryony Marks, Andrew Ford, Husky, Mark Seymour and many more as a composer/violinist.

Awards

Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award, 2021

Best Band Australian Folk Music Awards 2022

Golden Fiddle Award 2009


Composition credits include:

1996 SBS/Albert Street Productions Add Religion and Stir documentary film score

1998 ABC TV The Business of Making Saints documentary film score

2005 ABC TV/Albert Street Productions Hazaribag documentary film score

2009 Australian War Memorial film commission No Dramas film score

2018 Ami Williamson album The Quilt, string quartet composition

2020 Sydney Festival Rapture (Paul Capsis & Iota), string quartet composition

2022 Melbourne Symphony Chamber co-presentation: A suite of five new song arrangements   performed at Deakin Edge, Melbourne.

2022 New work composition for the Musica Viva 2021 Future Makers, Partridge String Quartet presented at the Melbourne Recital Centre

2022 ABC TV/Reckless Eye Productions Close To The Bone documentary film score.

Jenny’s theatre career began in 1998 as a composer/musician with Circus Oz and has included the Melbourne Workers Theatre and the Womens Circus. In 2019/20 she toured Melbourne Festival, Sydney Festival and Perth Festival in the cast of Anthem.

Establishing the music ensemble Bush Gothic in 2009, she challenged the traditional Australian folk canon by using folk songs as her source material, then re-arranging these old ballads to reflect Australia’s shifting cultural identity.  A post-modern bush band, Bush Gothic have performed at Rajasthan International Folk Festival, MonaFoma, Taurunga Arts Festival (NZ) Festival No. 6 (Wales) and Shambala Festival (UK). The addition of string quartet arrangements for Bush Gothic’s Victorian Heartbreak project took the repertoire into the fine music realm with performances at the Port Fairy Fine Music Festival, Melbourne Recital Centre and Ukaria Cultural Centre. Awards include:

  • fRoots UK Best of 2012 worldwide

  • BBC Music Magazine’s Best World Music Albums of 2016

  • fRoots Album of the Year 2016 - Runner Up

  • Adelaide Fringe Best Music Award 2018/2019 

  • Australian Folk Music Awards, Best Band Finalist 2021

Invited to represent Australia at the 2020 Welsh National Eisteddfod online, Jenny coordinated a team of ten artists across two hemispheres and four homes who collaboratively composed and recorded new arrangements of old Welsh songs and made accompanying film clips. As the Eisteddfod prohibited the English language Jenny began to learn her ancestral tongue of Welsh. Now a Welsh speaker,  in 2022 the Welsh National Eisteddfod presented Jenny performing live with Bush Gothic and Welsh artist Angharad Jenkins, forming part of Bush Gothic’s fourth international tour.


Jenny has been invited to write for The Irish Times, Yr Enfys (Wales International Magazine) and her creative output during Melbourne’s 2019 lockdown was analysed in a feature article in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Rhythms Magazine, BBC Music Magazine, The Guardian, Roots World, fRoots and Songlines have also written features on her work and along with the members of Bush Gothic she has been interviewed and performed live on ABC Radio National’s The Music Show, Triple J, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio Wales, RTÉ (National Broadcaster of Ireland) and Radio New Zealand. Her work has also received airplay on ABC Classic FM, SBS Radio, BBC World on 3, Regional BBC Radio and community stations across Australia, USA & the UK.