Nat Bartsch is a twice ARIA-nominated pianist, composer, producer and advocate from Melbourne, Australia. She is known for creating soothing, beautiful music that blends neoclassical composition with jazz harmony, improvisation and ethereal ambient effects. Her sound at the piano is distinctively gentle and warm, enriched by lyrical melodies. Her music is played across the world by people from all walks of life, often in deeply personal moments: literally from the birthing suite, to the final hours before death.
Nat has released nine albums, toured domestically and internationally, and collaborated with many leading Australian artists including Luke Howard, Grigoryan Brothers, Back to Back Theatre, Inventi Ensemble, Teeny Tiny Stevies, Playschool and Plexus Collective. She recently established her own record label, Amica Records, which includes Amica Familia, a home for mentoring and industry skills development for emerging artists. She is proudly neurodivergent.
Nat has become most well known for her lullabies, which, during early motherhood, saw her translate her gentle aesthetic into music with purpose. Nat created a suite of pieces designed to soothe babies to sleep, but also be meaningfully enjoyable for adults. After interviewing music therapists, she composed a series of pieces incorporating as many of their recommended parameters as possible (tempos similar to a mother’s heartbeat, gentle sounds, simple melodies and harmonies, ostinatos and repetition). Each piece is named after her newborn son’s stage of development at the time. The resulting album, Forever, and No Time At All was released in 2018 on ABC Classic. It is played regularly by many families, but also by people from all walks of life, including women in labour, autistic people, and people experiencing mental illness and grief.
Nat is also a chamber music composer, and has composed commissions for Grigoryan Brothers, Inventi Ensemble, Plexus Collective, Solstice Trio, Muses Trio, Stonnington Symphony Orchestra and Matt Withers & Sally Whitwell. She holds a Masters degree in classical composition from Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, and an Honours degree in jazz improvisation from the Victorian College of the Arts. She was also bandleader of her own jazz piano trio for many years.
This breadth of experience enables Nat to sit comfortably between genres, challenging assumptions of what a ›classical‹ or ›jazz‹ artist should be. Nat is one of a small handful of artists to be ARIA nominated in both jazz and classical categories in their career, and the first female instrumentalist.
