Dr Danae Killian

Danaë Killian is an Australian pianist whose poetry-infused performances have found regard internationally for their intense originality and rare communicative power. Her repertoire ranges across the complete solo piano music of the Second Viennese School, major polyphonic works by JS Bach, and a wealth of Australian compositions.

A passionate champion of modern art music, Danaë Killian has delivered over a hundred world premieres, performing throughout Europe, China and the USA, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards for her musical and academic prowess, including the Australian Alumni (W G Walker) Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, the Helen Macpherson Smith Scholarship, an Australian Postgraduate Award, and an Australia Award Endeavour Research Fellowship. Killian is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she earned her PhD in 2010 with a dissertation on Virginia Woolf’s The Waves as a modernist imagining of the harmony of the spheres. Her research project Transformations and Initiations: Sylvia Plath in Flames, in Performance resulted in three major performances produced between 2012 and 2015: Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime, The Dove’s Annihilation, and The Flame and the Rose Folded Together, all of which explored the relationship between poetry and music, biography and art, potential and actual selves. This theme was continued in Killian’s expressionist performance-creation My Heart (2017), a work of soul-homelessness and starry yearning, which sought the lost Berlin of 1911 within the creative hearts of Killian’s composer friends in Melbourne. Danaë Killian’s recording Arnold Schoenberg: Complete Works for Piano Solo for the Move label was launched in 2015 to critical acclaim, and her performances have been featured on further contemporary music CDs, including Eve Duncan’s Curiosities and Butterfly Modernism. Most recently. Danaë Killian collaborated with Barbara Hornung on the Move Records CD Ernest Bloch: Viola and Piano (2018). Danaë Killian is a Forest Collective core artist. Forest Collective is a new music ensemble based in Melbourne under the artistic direction of Evan Lawson. Danaë Killian's research interests cover piano performance (Bach, Mozart, Australian contemporary art music, 20th century European modernism); the musical processes and structures of poetic language, and their human ontological significance (Woolf, Plath); integral and transformative epistemologies (contemplative practice, existential phenomenology, anthroposophy, western and eastern alchemical traditions, Heidegger, Steiner); poetry in performance; the Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, serialism, expressionism); and the ontology of performance.

Find out more about Danae Killian's experience

Danae Killian's highlights

FEATURED Live Performance of Creative Work

Pierrot Lunaire: Ein geschlossenes Zauberbuch von Pierrot

Danae Killian's selected work

The Flame and the Rose Folded Together

Live Performance of Creative Work

For Grasping Schoenberg: An Epistemology of Sense and Meaning in Word, Music, and the Movi..

Original Creative Work - Textual Work

Arnold Schoenberg: Complete Works for Piano Solo

Original Creative Work - Musical Composition

Sylvia Plath in the Domestic Sublime: A Pianist Opens Her Veins and Speaks

Live Performance of Creative Work

The Dove's Annihilation: Sylvia Plath and the Kingdom, the Power, the Glory

Live Performance of Creative Work

Butterfly Modernism / chamber music by Eve Duncan

Creative Published Work

Scholarly Works

Displaying the 36 most recent scholarly works by Danae Killian.

Refugees, Remembrance and Resilience

Killian Dunane, Zachary Dunbar

Presentation | 2019

Within a long and varied program, Danae Killian performed Pieces Nos. 1, 2 and 3 from Klavierstuecke, Op. 23 by Arnold Schoenberg,..

Musical tone and the archetypal inwardness of being

Danae Killian

Presentation | 2019

Conference: Wisdom, Sofia and the Holy Spirit:...from the beginning