“[Caitlin] has two modes: minute fiddling or epic shred. nothing in the middle” – Edward Henderson, collaborator
“the Q Branch of Bastard Assignments” – The Wire
“the most shatteringly stratospheric shriek I have ever heard” – The Telegraph
Caitlin Rowley is a composer, artist and performer. Her work is post-disciplinary and playful, creating works for live in-person performance, video pieces, online environments and instruments. She often works with documentation of her creative process as musical material and her scores sometimes take the form of unique art objects. Caitlin is interested in blurring the boundaries between private and public creative practice, and between music and the visual arts. As a performer, she is principally a noise violist and experimental vocalist, but her skills also include electronics, lipsync, characterisation and playing assorted stationery and packing materials.
Caitlin’s work – solo or with Bastard Assignments – has been performed or exhibited in venues including Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, the Barbican, Southbank Centre, Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Morley Gallery, Brisbane Powerhouse, Blackheath Halls, the Thames Tunnel Shaft, the Royal Academy of Arts, Proud Archivist Gallery Café and 44AD Art Space, and at festivals in Australia, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Germany and the UK. Her music has been broadcast on national radio in Australia and the UK. She is an Associate Artist at the Australian Music Centre.
Caitlin studied composition with Peter Sculthorpe at the University of Sydney for her Bachelor of Music degree with Honours, and screen composition with Jan Preston at the Australian Film Television and Radio School. After moving to the UK, she studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance* where her teachers and mentors included Errollyn Wallen MBE, Paul Newland, Stephen Montague, Dominic Murcott and Sam Hayden. She graduated with Distinction from Trinity Laban’s Master of Fine Arts Creative Practice (Music) course in 2014, following this with courses in Sound Art and Field Recording at Morley College. In January 2026, Caitlin completed her doctorate in interdisciplinary composition (“Studio/Stage: Entangling private and public creative spaces through interdisciplinary composition”) under the supervision of composer James Saunders and artist Robert Luzar at Bath Spa University.
Caitlin freelances as a composer, performer, producer, and higher education teacher, as well as working as Research Contracts and Knowledge Manager for Zubin Kanga’s Cyborg Soloists research project at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a member of the acclaimed composer-performer group Bastard Assignments, with whom she creates new experimental music and art pieces and tours regularly, most recently creating the 75-minute musiktheater work PIGSPIGSPIGS commissioned byBorealis – a festival for experimental music, Spor Festival and Wigmore Hall, and the 8-hour music installation HOUSE for Musik Installationen Nürnberg. She also works collaboratively with the South-West-based artist collective Kaths Kaff.
Caitlin is also active as a researcher and writer. Her work on Erik Satie began during her undergraduate degree and continues to the present day. This is published online at Erik Satie’s Crystal Ball, which has been recommended as a research resource by Ivy League universities and the NSW Government’s HSC Online website. You can view a list of Caitlin’s publications here, and she also writes intermittently about her current research, works in progress, the creative process and the role of fear in creativity on her blog on this site. Between 2017 and 2020, she maintained a regular presence on YouTube, vlogging her creative practice, and this site includes a complete record of her composition notebooks from March 2019, both projects part of her doctoral research.
- Explore Caitlin’s work
- Read Caitlin’s Credo on this site
- Talk to Caitlin about commissioning a new piece
Biography current to April 2026.