Teaching and academic work

Portelli works as a unit coordinator and casual lecturer in music at Western Sydney University and the University of New England. He is a Badugulang Fellow and an Associate Fellow with the Advanced Higher Education Academy.

He gave a guest lecture at the University of Sydney about his artistic research in 2018. In 2020, he presented a webinar about cultural resilience in a time of crisis at Western Sydney University.

Selected performers and ensembles

His music has been performed by a range of new music ensembles and soloists around the world, such as Tracensemble, Peyee Chen, Diego Castro Magaš, Soundstream Collective, Gabriella Smart, Adelaide Philharmonic Choir, The Music Box Project, Vertixe Sonora, Two New Duo, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tamara Anna Cislowska, ESMUC Ensemble, Ensemble New Babylon, Alana Blackburn, Claire Edwardes, Liu Ying, and by a robotic piano named RHEA.

Research, writing and publications

His work has featured on multiple playlists by Making Waves, a monthly curated series that features Australian art music. He has a journal article published with Leonardo Music Journal and MIT Press entitled Music Gesture and the Correspondence of Lines: Collaborative Video Mediation and Methodology, which draws a relationship between music gesture, anthropology, lines, correspondence and his recent developments in video scoring technology.

He published an article in ADSR Zine edition 013 called Music in Impossible Spaces about virtual heterotopias, the spaces of dreams, decorporalised music and a muse on our inner imaginary sonic experiences. ADSR Zine won the award for Excellence in Experimental Music for their 2021 activities, which included this work.

His video essay What the River Doesn’t Say About Itself was published in the Journal of Embodied Research for their special issue on Ecologies of Embodiment, a co-composition with mangroves and with members of The Music Box Project who perform on small boats.

He also has a peer-reviewed article published about his quasi-musical theatre work Mapping Australia, which is a critical look at Australia’s cartography practices from the 1960s with deeper cultural connotations and reflections, published in the fifth issue of the CeReNeM Journal.

Ecology, dreams and expanded composition

Portelli was involved in the Composition Beyond Music workshop established by composer Peter Ablinger, where he exhibited an interactive video/sound installation at ESC gallery in Graz, Austria as part of Impuls Music Academy.

In 2020, he created an imaginary sound art series where one of the pieces involves internalising a graphic score, Dream Recorder. He also worked with anonymous dream stories taken from the COVID on MIND and Pandemic Dreams research studies to develop a new ensemble piece about our connection to whales and oceanographic change, commissioned by Ensemble New Babylon, Bremen, Germany.

He was a composer in residence in a 16-week multi-art-form collaboration for a library in Western Sydney. In 2014, he represented Australia as the Young Composer Representative at the Asian Music Festival in Tokyo and Yokohama.

Arts service, commissions and recordings

He is also a peer assessor for the Australia Council for the Arts, working as an industry advisor for experimental/contemporary classical music and the cross-disciplinary arts. He exhibited a sound art installation, Water Pail, at World Square, Sydney, in the Now You Hear Her festival.

He was the winner of the Winston Music ECF commission where he wrote a new work for choir and ensemble, conducted by Warwick Stengårds of Opera Australia.

His music is also featured on the CD Playing with Fire, released under Wirripang Media Pty. Ltd, as part of a series of electroacoustic compositions performed by Australian pianist Tamara Anna Cislowska.