Composers 2007
Bushra El-Turk studied composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Julian Philips. She has written various works for the concert hall, most recently Le Fantôme de Rebecca Griffiths performed at the City of London Festival. She has enjoyed a particularly fruitful artistic partnership with choreographer Aya Jane Saotome, with whom she collaborated on two productions: Tende(r)age and Peck (The Place Theatre, London). Bushra has enjoyed writing music for the theatre. Most notable productions include I Capture The Castle (dir. Christian Burgess) and Twelfth Night (dir. Christopher Luscombe). Projects for 2007: a piece for Orkester de Ereprijs after being selected to participate in the Young Composers Meeting in the Netherlands, a concert in aid of the children of Lebanon at St John's Smith Square with includes her piece, Ta'atallat Loughatul Kalami and a video installation by the up-and-coming producer, Allan Hambidge.
Bushra's myspace page
Iain Farrington has written works for piano, organ, chorus and numrous ensembles. His first major success was with his organ suite Fiesta! It has been performed in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, across Europe and in the Bridewater Hall, Manchester, Westminster Abbey, St Paul's Cathedral. Movements from the suite have been recorded on two Hyperion discs, and on three recordings from Dublin and Blackburn. His anthem Rejoice for choir and organ won the RSCM 2004 Anthem Prize, and was first performed by Norwich Cathedral Choir, and subsequently by the London Philharmonic Choir. Recent premieres include Heatwave for oboe, flute and piano, Changes for cello solo, and Scorcher for Sounds Underground.
Iain has arranged and performed over one hundred diverse works, from Mozart to Gershwin. His solo piano arrangement of Elgar/Payne Symphony No.3 is published by Boosey and Hawkes, and his transcription of Elgar's Five Piano Improvisations is published by Novello. His organ arrangements of Walton's music have been recorded on the Naxos label. In 2005, Iford Opera performed his chamber orchestral version of Dvorak's Rusalka.
www.iainfarrington.com
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Cheryl Frances-Hoad graduated from Gonville and Caius College with a triple 1st in 2001 and an Mphil (with Distinction) in Composition, also at Cambridge. She began composing at the age of eight while studying ‘cello and piano at the Yehudi Menuhin School, and since then has won several prizes, including the Purcell Composition Prize, The Bach Choir Carol Competition, the BBC Young Composers Workshop 1996, the Cambridge Composer’s Competition, the Birmingham Conservatoire Composition Competition and the Robert Helps Prize. She has had two ballets choreographed by Lynn Seymour and Geoffrey Cauley; the second was performed by Scottish Ballet in the Britten Theatre, London.
Cheryl's commissions include works for the BBC, the Surrey Philharmonic, the Manchester International ‘Cello Festival, the Chard Festival of Women in Music, the Bass Club, Bass Fest, the Almeida Festival, the Schubert Ensemble, the Fujita Piano trio, and the Kreisler Ensemble, and her music has been featured on BBC2, ITV, Radio 3 and Classic FM. She is has recently completed a Phd in Composition at King’s College London.
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Sydney-born Alicia Grant holds a LRAM and first-class BMus(Hons) degree from the Royal Academy of Music, University of London where she studied composition with Simon Bainbridge. Whilst at the RAM, she won numerous scholarships and prizes including the Charles Lucas prize and the William Elkin prize. She is currently completing her PhD in composition at Worcester College with Dr Robert Saxton. In 2004 she won the John Lowell Osgood Memorial prize for composition at Oxford.
Grant’s works have been performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles across the globe, including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Choir of Westminster Abbey, the BBC Singers, New College Choir and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. In 2005, her specially commissioned work, ANZAC Anthem, for choir and organ, was premiered in the presence of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Many of her compositions have been broadcast on radio, in particular for Australia’s ABC Classic FM. 2007 sees performances of her works in the US: Cross Currents for solo piano at Carnegie Hall in New York (world premiere) and Centrifugue for orchestra in Piedmont, California (US premiere).
www.aliciagrantcomposer.com
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Johnny Herford began composing at a very early age. He has studied with Paul Patterson, Diana Burrell, Robert Saxton and Jonathan Harvey. Since his String Sextet was performed in the Bournemouth Festival in 1993 he has written mainly chamber music. Both his Fifth and Sixth String Quartets were performed by the Bochman Quartet in 2000 and 2002 respectively. He was one of the first members of the National Youth Orchestra Composer’s Course where he was encouraged to branch out, producing amongst other pieces a percussion quintet and a multi-media absurdist music-theatre piece. Other NYO compositions included The Stone Verdict, a meditation on the desire for absolute knowledge featuring poems by Seamus Heaney and E.E. Cummings, and an orchestral piece, Nocturne, inspired by artworks from Tate Modern. From 2003 to 2006 he studied Music at Cambridge, with Robin Holloway as his Composition Supervisor. During this time he completed a Piano Trio, two song-cycles, which he premiered himself, Four Sacred Pieces for choir and organ, and a large-ensemble piece: Possessions. He hopes to start post-graduate study in 2008 as a baritone. Back to top
Bernard Hughes’ music has been performed by the BBC Singers, the New London Children’s Choir and the Cavendish Singers. He has received commissions from the Huddersfield, Spitalfields and Bangor New Music Festivals, and has been performed at venues including St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Snape Maltings.
The piece But What Beyond received the William Mathias Composition Prize in 2003; Suck It and See, for string quartet, was a runner-up in the 2005 Aberdeen University Composition Prize. Other recent performances include premieres at Westminster Cathedral and St. Marks, New York City. Projects from 2006 included The Death of Balder for the BBC Singers at Spitalfields Festival and a children’s opera based on Bengali folk-tales, commissioned by the London-based company W11 Opera.
Bernard Hughes’ music has been broadcast on Radio 3, and he appeared as a conductor on the recent Channel 4 series Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats. In April 2004 the major article ’Magical Theatres: the music of Param Vir’ was published in the new music periodical Tempo; he has also written on the composer Judith Weir.
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Elena Langer studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, the Royal College of Music and at the Centre Acanthes in France. She is now working on a PhD at the RAM with Simon Bainbridge. There are several recordings of her work, including Transformations (1996/rev 98) for violin and piano and Reflection (1994/rev 98) for piano solo on the Black Box label.
Elena was the Jerwood composer in Association with the Almeida Theatre (2002 - 2003). She was commissioned to write two chamber operas in collaboration with the poet Glyn Maxwell. These commissions - Ariadne and The Girl of Sand - were staged at the Almeida Opera Festival in 2002. Ariadne was also staged in Aldeburgh and Moscow and has received a Priauxl Rainier Prize. In 2004, Elena was supported by the Genesis Foundation to produce a scene for a chamber opera,The Umbrella.
Elena has received commissions and performances from international ensembles and organisations such as the Almeida Opera Festival (UK), The Britten and Strauss Festival in Aldeburgh (UK), Dartington Summer Festival (UK), Gaudeamus New Music Week (Netherlands), Homecoming Chamber Music Festival (Russia), Moscow Autumn Festival (Russia), Park Lane Group (UK), St. Petersburg's Music Spring (Russia) and the State of the Nation Festival (UK). Some of her works have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, BBC World Service, Radio Echo of Moscow and Dutch Radio.
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Henry Ng (b. 1981) is a SOCAN award winning composer and sound artist from Canada, whose works have been performed by ensembles and organizations such as the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, and the Canadian Contemporary Music Workshop. Recent activities include Toronto’s 2006 Nuit Blanche contemporary art event, as an artist assistant for one of the newly commissioned works, and as a composer at the 2006 MusMix festival for music with electronics. In the past, Henry’s music has been broadcast on CIUT and CBC Radio in Canada, and he has also presented his technical and creative work at a conference organized by the UK's Digital Music Research Network.
Henry studied composition in Canada at the University of Toronto and McGill University in Montreal, and at the Royal College of Music in the UK. He has participated in computer music workshops in Canada and Europe, and continues to have an interest in music that incorporates technology and new media. He is a member of the Canadian League of Composers (CLC), the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), and also works in the audio visual industry.
www.henryngmusic.com
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Dylan Pugh has collaborated with visual artists and choreographers, written for contemporary ensembles, and composed scores for two UK Film Council funded shorts: Featherman and The End of the Line (starring Miriam Margolyes and shortlisted for Best Short Film, Soho Rushes 2004). TV work includes scores for the Channel 4 Citibank Photography Prize series of documentaries and for the London Shakespeare Workout documentaries Shadows and Bully Me; Bully Who? Working for theatre, Dylan has composed, arranged and performed scores for the European Theatre Group touring production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and the London Shakespeare Workout production of Henry VI Part iii.
Classical commissions include Golden Ratios (for Lord Eatwell, President of Queens' College, Cambridge), A Prayer for String Quartet (performed in the abandoned Aldwych Tube Station), The Other Trout (for the Sophie's Silver Lining Music Festival 2003), A Quartet for Love (for the Honourable Society of Gray's Inn) and Open Secret, for Sounds Underground. Dylan collaborated with the composer Kenneth Tharpe to create a piece for dance performed in March 2005 as part of the Vigani’s Cabinet project at Queens’ College, Cambridge.
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