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Wally Gunn (born Wallace Andrew Gunn) is an Australian composer and vocalist. He writes mostly for small and large ensembles, and often focuses on voices, strings and percussion. His composition The Ascendant was included on Roomful of Teeth’s album Render, which was nominated for a 2015 Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

Biography
Gunn was born in Ballarat, Victoria in 1971. He gained renown in the 1990s for performing in various Australian rock and electronic bands, including Disaster Plan and The Blow Waves. For a time he was a touring member of both Something For Kate and The Mavis's. He also performed and recorded as a solo artist.

In 2002 Gunn began formal music studies, graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne with a B.A. in Music Composition (Honours) in 2006. He relocated to New York City and continued his studies at the Manhattan School of Music, and subsequently Princeton University, where he is a currently a doctoral fellow.

Career
Gunn's composition work spans many genres and media. He has composed for theater, film, visual art installation and also creates electronic music. His work has been described as "hypnotic and intensely moving". Gunn has received commissions from Brooklyn Youth Chorus, percussionist Becca Doughty, Gemini Duo, The Letter String Quartet , the New Works For Percussion Project, Roomful of Teeth, guitarist Laura Snowden , Steady State , Tala Rasa, Three , and Jason Treuting. Gunn has devised work with Brooklyn-based experimental theater company Nothing To See Here, under the artistic direction of Laura Sheedy. He went on to become a company member in 2014, and together they created the piece Long Distance in collaboration with Melbourne writer Scott Brennan. In 2018 Gunn's piece Pinwheel was selected by ABC Classic as part of its entry to the International Rostrum of Composers. In 2019, as a MacDowell Colony fellow, Gunn completed work on a large scale oratorio titled Moonlite, based on the true story of 19th-century Australian outlaw Andrew George Scott. It premiered in May of the same year, performed by ensembles Mobius Percussion and Variant 6. Moonlite garnered the 2019 Albert H Maggs Composition Award, the panel describing the work as "an extraordinary achievement."