Alex Turley is a composer based in Australia. He grew up in Sydney and Perth.
Highly sought-after as a collaborative artist, Alex has worked with all of Australia's major orchestras and a diverse group of artists including Ali McGregor, Banks, Ben Folds, Dan Sultan, Electric Fields, Emma Donovan, Eskimo Joe, Genesis Owusu, G Flip, the Hoodoo Gurus, Katie Noonan, Lime Cordiale, Ngaiire, Paul Grabowsky, Parkway Drive, Rob Thomas, Ruel and Rüfüs Du Sol.
Alex was the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's 2022 Young Composer-in-Residence, a position through which he was commissioned to create three new orchestral works. Between 2023 and 2025 he was awarded a highly competitive Creative and Performance Leadership Fellowship from the Forrest Research Foundation with a research project focused on environment-driven collaborative composition. In 2024 he was the UNSW Layton Emerging Composer Fellow.
Significant recent works include the ocean’s dream of itself, a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra premiered by Sasha Cooke at the Grand Teton Music Festival, Mirage, a piece for brass ensemble designed to be spread out across the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall and commissioned by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and Agam, a fifty-minute long suite of three orchestral pieces developed in collaboration with South Asian artist collective Sangam for performance at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl.
In 2021, Alex travelled to Larrakia country to work on Barra-róddjiba, an orchestral collaboration with rock band Ripple Effect and Kunibídji elders of Maningrida for the Darwin Symphony Orchestra. This piece was written by sending sound files back and forth between Maningrida and Melbourne and was lauded as an "innovative cross-cultural performance" (Limelight).
Alex's orchestral work City of Ghosts, written for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra when the composer was nineteen, was described as "an accessible, brilliant piece of music" (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) and possessing a "refined sense of texture and atmosphere" (Partial Durations), while the more recent chamber work Zero Sum Game was lauded as an "exciting aural landscape...alternatively driving and luxuriating, the young composer taking the compositional turns with ease" (Limelight).
Regularly working outside genre boundaries, Alex frequently works on projects which bring fresh ideas into traditional spaces. In 2022 his show with Electric Fields and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra was described as an "effervescent, electronic neo-soul song cycle...sonically painted live by the limitless textures of the most profound musical organism" (Beat).
Alex completed a Master of Music (Composition) at the Sydney Conservatorium with a research project investigating diverse approaches to musical temporality. This followed undergraduate studies in composition at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts with a First Class Honours Thesis investigating the work of Toru Takemitsu. He is the recipient of the Henderson Postgraduate Scholarship from the University of Sydney, John & Margaret Winstanley Award from WAAPA, an Edith Cowan Excellence Scholarship, a finalist in the APRA AMCOS Professional Development Awards and in 2021 won the Arcadia Winds Composition Prize.
