Queer Nights at Nightingale: A Music Festival for Pride Month

Each June, Pride Month invites a renewed encounter with queer culture, celebrating its richness and power to shape the artistic landscape. In this spirit, Nightingale Gallery presents the inaugural Queer Nights at Nightingale, a finely curated festival under the artistic direction of internationally acclaimed pianist Coady Green.

Across four Friday evenings, leading Australian artists assume the role of curator-performer, each shaping a program of distinctive voice and vision. Drawing on music by LGBTQIA+ composers from Australia and abroad, these concerts traverse a wide and evocative terrain, foregrounding queer perspectives, reimagining inherited traditions, and illuminating histories too often left unheard.

Featuring Coady Green (Concert One), Meta Cohen (Concert Two), Robert McIntyre (Concert Three) and Cameron Lam (Concert Four), Queer Nights at Nightingale unfolds as a space of artistry, inquiry, and celebration, where music becomes a living expression of identity and imagination.

Join us at Nightingale Gallery in Armadale for an intimate festival experience, with drinks and opportunities to meet artists following each performance.

Tickets can be purchased for each event individually, or as a package of four tickets for the whole festival.

Concert One: Voice, Body, Witness curated by Coady Green

5th June, 7:30pm

Opening the festival, pianist Coady Green presents a program tracing a journey from creation to voice, and from stillness to urgent expression.

With evocative works by Inti Figgis-Vizueta and Nico Muhly, and sublime meditations by John Cage, the program also features Bryn Renard’s queer being, queer being, a deeply personal exploration of identity and transformation, and Meta Cohen’s The Warning Never Heard, a powerful new cycle of voice and testimony.

Program:

Inti Figgis-Vizueta: earthmaker (2020)

Bryn Renard: queer being, queer being (2026)

Nico Muhly: Drones and Violin (2011)

interval

John Cage: Dream

John Cage: In a Landscape

Meta Cohen: The Warning Never Heard:

i. one day

ii. you will know

iii. the truths

iv. she has spoken

Concert Two: Curated by Meta Cohen

12th June, 7:30pm

Composer Meta Cohen presents an evening of music that explores moments of queer love, playfulness and resistance across time. Featuring internationally celebrated artists Jessica Aszodi (mezzo-soprano), Rachael Joyce (soprano) and Coady Green (piano), this concert includes Meta Cohen’s Sword Songs, a song cycle about 17th Century bisexual sword-fighting opera singer Julie d’Aubigny. The program intersperses this major work with pieces by contemporary and historical queer composers.

Concert Three: Fault Lines curated by Robert McIntyre

19th June, 7:30pm

Curated by composer Robert McIntyre, Aether Duo presents Fault Lines, an evening of flute and piano works by LGBTQIA+ composers Robert McIntyre, Sally Whitwell, Sam Williams and more – dealing both subtly and directly with elements pertaining to the lived queer experience and the environments and space we rightly take up.

With queerness often viewed (and experienced) as an epicentre of both tension and generative force, Fault Lines explores queer life through that geology. In a culture that treats straightness as the stable ground beneath us, queerness is often framed as deviation or rupture to that ground — something “across the line” that is disparate to the status quo. But fault lines aren’t anomalies: they are structures, pathways, and truth made visible at the surface. Across this curation, we invite you to listen for the crack, the shift, and the new landscape that follows – when acceptance becomes the normalisation of divergence.

Aether Duo

Robert McIntyre, flute

Sam Williams, piano

Concert Four: Technicolour curated by Cameron Lam

26th June, 7:30pm

Curated by composer Cameron Lam, Technicolour explores American and Australian queer works of play, subculture, and vibrant colour.

The program showcases Lam’s work written for each of the featured performers: We Touch to Feel for pianist Coady Green, Heart of Life* for soprano Marjorie Hannah, and 8-bit Sonata #2: BIRB* for Dafydd Camp on cor anglais. These pieces are connected through cabaret songs by John Coons & Jonah Wheeler, the video game

music of Josie Brechner, Hew Wagner, & Belinda Coomes, and the concert music of Nicole Murphy, Kincaid Rabb, and Alex Turley.

*world premiere