Gillian Maitland | |
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 Gillian Maitland performing in 2010 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 26 September 1985 Dundee, Scotland |
| Genres | Classical, light contemporary |
| Occupation(s) | Marimba and Vibraphone soloist, percussionist, composer, educator, public speaker |
| Years active | 2009–present |
| Website | www |
Gillian Maitland (born 26 September 1985) is a Scottish marimba soloist, percussionist and composer.
Maitland's musical life began when she started drum kit lessons at the age of 12. She quickly progressed, adding piano and saxophone to the mix. When she was 16, she was accepted to the prestigious St Mary's Music School in Edinburgh as their first ever percussionist where the school build a soundproofed percussion room especially. Here she had her first opportunity to study the marimba, where she advanced very quickly. In her time at St Mary's Music School, Maitland attended elite courses including Juilliard Summer Percussion Seminar, National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and Edinburgh Youth Orchestra, as well as winning many music competitions and awards for her exceptional abilities on the marimba. [1]
Throughout Maitland's education, she has racked up some single and long term lessons with some of the world's most renowned percussionists. These include Dame Evelyn Glennie, [2] Ney Rosauro, Kai Stensgaard, Joseph Gramley, Janis Potter, Nick Petrella as well as members of the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic.
In 2005, after performing marimba to the G8 Wives at Glamis Castle and winning the award of Angus Youth Ambassador, [3] [4] Maitland won an exceptional £80,000 grant from the Donald Dewar Arts Awards to study with the world-renowned Ney Rosauro at the University of Miami Frost School of music. [5] In September 2007, in her third year of studies, she was involved in a road traffic accident resulting in her left leg becoming permanently paralysed below the knee. Maitland had to return to her native Scotland to learn to walk again, with the use of an ankle foot orthotic brace. Unfortunately, due to the length of her recovery, Maitland was not able to finish her degree.[ citation needed ]
Following her long recovery process, Maitland gained the funding to purchase a five-octave marimba in 2009, when she also became an official Encore Mallets Endorser. Maitland then went on to perform for Prince Charles at the 20th anniversary of Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust. [6] [7]
Maitland released her debut album 'Plocanan' in 2014. The album features both marimba and vibraphone and includes both works by Debussy and Bach, as well as contemporary. The album also has the premier recording of Robert Paterson (composer)'s 'Merry Go Round' which is a 6-mallet solo published in 1990.
In 2015, Maitland took on the roll of Head of Kingdom Percussion Academy, part of Kingdom Youth Brass Initiative where students are taught solo, ensemble and group percussion on professional equipment not commonly available in Scotland. She is also the Head of Percussion for Kingdom Championship Brass Band, based in Cowdenbeath, Fife.
Along with performing, Maitland is also a composer and arranger of percussion music published by Southern Percussion.
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and chordophone.
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the marimba has a lower range. Typically, the bars of a marimba are arranged chromatically, like the keys of a piano. The marimba is a type of idiophone.
The vibraphone is a percussion instrument in the metallophone family. It consists of tuned metal bars and is typically played by using mallets to strike the bars. A person who plays the vibraphone is called a vibraphonist,vibraharpist, or vibist.
Dame Evelyn Elizabeth Annie Glennie, is a Scottish percussionist. She was selected as one of the two laureates for the Polar Music Prize of 2015.
A percussion mallet or beater is an object used to strike or beat a percussion instrument to produce its sound.
Tania León is a Cuban-born American composer of both large scale and chamber works. She is also renowned as a conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations.
Steve Reich and Musicians, sometimes credited as the Steve Reich Ensemble, is a musical ensemble founded and led by the American composer Steve Reich. The group has premiered and performed many of Reich's works both nationally and internationally. In 1999, Reich received a Grammy Award for "Best Small Ensemble Performance " for the ensemble's performance of Music for 18 Musicians.
Mitchell Thomas Peters was a principal timpanist and percussionist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. He composed well-known pieces for the marimba such as "Yellow After the Rain" and "Sea Refractions"; it is said that these works were composed because Peters felt that there was a lack of musically interesting material that would introduce his students to four-mallet marimba techniques.
Vida Chenoweth was a solo classical marimbist, an ethnomusicologist, and a linguist.
Douglas William Walter, DMA is Professor of Percussion at the University of Colorado Boulder College of Music, and was the first marimba and vibraphone artist to win a First Prize in the Concert Artists Guild Competition in NYC.
David Joel Danford is a British percussionist. He is best known for his work as a classical percussion soloist but has also worked with numerous dance music producers including BBC Radio 1 DJ Judge Jules.
Robert Paterson is an American composer of contemporary classical music, as well as a conductor and percussionist. His catalog includes over 100 compositions. He has been called a "modern day master" and is primarily known for his colorful orchestral works, large body of chamber music and clear vocal writing in his operas, choral works, vocal chamber works and song cycles.
Marti Epstein is an American composer. She is Professor of Composition at Berklee College of Music and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Linda Maxey is a celebrated concert marimbist virtuoso and was the first marimbist presented by Community Concerts, a division of Columbia Artists Management in New York that presented concerts to a network of subscription audiences whose pooled resources attracted leading performers and ensembles.
Roland Haerdtner, orig. Härdtner is a German marimba player, a soloist for mallet instruments, percussion and timpani. Since 1993 he is principal timpanist and percussionist of the Badische Philharmonie Pforzheim.
Emmanuel Séjourné is a French composer and percussionist, and head of percussion at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. His music is influenced by Western classical music and by popular music.
Conjurer: Concerto for Percussionist and String Orchestra is a concerto for a solo percussionist and string orchestra by the American composer John Corigliano. The work was jointly commissioned for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Nashville Symphony, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Music Department (Lisbon), and the National Arts Centre Orchestra. It was given its world premiere by Glennie and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Marin Alsop in Pittsburgh on February 21, 2008.
A percussion concerto is a type of musical composition for a percussion soloist and a large ensemble, such as a concert band or orchestra. Two notable figures in the genre are the percussionists Colin Currie and Evelyn Glennie, who have separately commissioned and premiered numerous entrees to the repertoire. Two common subsets of the percussion concerto are the timpani concerto and the marimba concerto.
Ney Rosauro is a Brazilian composer and percussionist.
Jordan Ashman is a British multi-percussionist born in 2004 in Bury St Edmunds, and is the winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year award in 2022.
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