audience of billions, attracting great international acclaim. In 2007 he was Musica Viva Australia’s Featured Composer. Collaborations In 2005, Edwards' oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming, originally composed for oboist Diana Doherty and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, had its US premiere by Doherty, the New York Philharmonic and Lorin Maazel, after which it was toured worldwide and received enthusiastically. Another notable success was the 2010 UK premiere of the violin concerto Maninyas, given at the 2010 Edinburgh International Festival by its dedicatee, Dene Olding, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy. This work has also gained international popularity through choreography for dance, notably by Stanton Welch for the San Francisco Ballet. Another Welch/Edwards collaboration, the ballet Zodiac, was successfully premiered by the Houston Ballet in 2015. Edwards' music, with its unique rhythms, has a natural affinity with dance. Another important collaboration with Australian saxophonist Amy Dickson, who now lives in London has produced three new works: the saxophone concerto Full Moon Dances (2012); the double concerto Frog and Star Cycle, for whose 2016 premiere Dickson was paired with the Scottish percussionist Colin Currie and accompanied by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; and Bright Birds and Sorrows, which Dickson premiered at the 2017 Musica Viva Festival in Sydney with the Elias String Quartet, visiting from the UK. Musical style and philosophy Early period: the influence of the natural world In the early 1970s Edwards experienced an unexpected crisis. Disenchanted by the European music of the time, which was itself in crisis due to the waning of the Modernist movement, he found himself unable to compose for several years. Having returned to Australia due to the terminal illness of his mother, and while lecturing at the Sydney Conservatorium, he moved in 1974 with his wife and infant son to the village of Pearl Beach, north of Sydney, where his sister-in-law had a holiday house. Pearl Beach, which adjoined the Brisbane Water National Park "buzzing with wildlife", had an immediate effect on him and his work. "The summer days were swathed in the drones of cicadas with their mysteriously abrupt starts and stops and, at evening, the insects would start up. I was entranced by the insect chorus because it seemed to be on the verge of conveying some profound message which was ultimately elusive. All the temporal relationships in my music – the relative lengths of phrases and sections – are influenced by these