The young musician-performer is the 2016 winner of the $9000 Robert Juniper Award for the Arts, an annual honour presented by the Mundaring Bicentennial Scholarship Trust.
Winning the Juniper award will enable the 19-year-old composer to bring an ambitious project to life at the Mundaring Arts Centre in July.
Studying for a Bachelor of Music at WAAPA, Moses found an interest in spatial music; a genre that pre-dates digital and which works by projecting sound through more than one source.
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A presentation by experimental music composer Aviva Endean gave her the idea of presenting music accessibly through a sound installation, and inspired the project proposal that won her the latest award.
Moses described spatial sound as music presented in a way not unlike a surround sound system and equally possible through live presentation by positioning musicians in different areas of a room.
“I want to try something I haven’t done before: using space as the main prompt for the music,” she said.
She approached visual artist Shannon Lyons, who became her partner in the project.
With a working title of 5.0 and piece of 4×2, Moses said the idea is to build a space – a sound scape – the audience can walk through and experience the transparency of art, almost subliminally .
The working title focuses on the ‘tools’ used by the two artists to create and present art, with Moses gathering sounds for the installation with a portable recorder.
In the meantime, the young musician is managing, producing and performing the equally ambitious Fringe World production The Butterfly Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast, a music-poetry performance of the 1975 studio album, inspired by the illustrated children’s book of the same name.
Growing up in Gidgegannup, where she lived until moving to Bedford, the Hills talent attended the local primary school and Helena College in Glen Forrest.
Her musical journey began at the age of six, when she started piano lessons and by the age of nine, she was writing songs.
She recalls her teacher, Heather Luke, helped her score the music and write lyrics for a song about zebras.
“By the end of primary school I was composing contemporary folk songs, performing my own music and making some recordings,” she said.
“I also took up the guitar and mandolin.”
Her musicality flourished at high school and studying music at university, she said, had opened her mind to many new ideas.
In her first year at WAAPA, encouraged to write a music score, Moses collected a $500 excellence award for music composition from a TV company.
She believes a willingness to embrace new music styles has added to her versatility as a musician and complemented an early love of writing and performing folk songs.
“To make a living as a musician, you have to be open to doing new things,” she said.
While musical ability runs in the family – her father Eric played in a band at university – Moses, the youngest of three children, is first in the family to pursue a career in the industry.
She performs locally every month at Mal Malling Vineyard in Parkerville and will accompany musician Jonathan Brain on February 10 at the Darlington Dental Office of Karl Bailey, where Dr Bailey invites young musicians to perform in his waiting room next to 2 Cafe.