Martin Green (Born 28 November 1980 in Norwich, Norfolk, England) is an English musician and composer. He is the accordionist in the folk trio Lau, who won a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists.
His career as a composer began in 2003 with the goliath environmental theatre production of 'Albatross' [1] based on Shackleton's journey, which was the centrepiece of the Glastonbury Festival's Theatre Field in 2004.
Alongside Aidan O'Rourke and Kris Drever, Green formed Lau in 2005. The folk trio have won awards including Best Group at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards on four occasions. [2]
Green has been developing his solo career as a composer and has received a string of commissions, most significantly his theatrical song cycle Crows’ Bones for Opera North in 2012/13. [3]
In 2014 he won a Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists [4] in recognition of his work as a composer.
In 2015 Green was commissioned to write music and create a new noise device by the Kronos Quartet. The new piece of music, Seiche, was performed on the Kronos Quartet's UK tour in 2016. [5]
Green began work on Flit in 2016, a new production created in collaboration with BAFTA-winning animators Will Anderson and Ainslie Henderson of whiterobot. Flit features musicians Adrian Utley, Dominic Aitchison, Becky Unthank (of The Unthanks) and Adam Holmes and premieres at the Edinburgh International Festival 2016.
Martin Green has also worked as a session musician for Linda Thompson and Eliza Carthy among others. As part of Lau he has performed with Jack Bruce of Cream.
Green's ancestors were Jewish refugees who fled Austria in the 1930s. His great-grandfather ended up in a Jewish ghetto in Shanghai, then a few years later his grandmother left for London with her mother. Green grew up in Leeds. His partner is musician Inge Thomson; the family lives in Shetland. [2]
Terrence Mitchell Riley, is an American composer and performing musician best known as a pioneer of the minimalist school of composition. Influenced by jazz and Indian classical music, his music became notable for its innovative use of repetition, tape music techniques, and delay systems. He produced his best known works in the 1960s: the 1964 composition In C and the 1969 LP A Rainbow in Curved Air, both considered landmarks of minimalism and important influences on experimental, rock, and contemporary electronic music.
Brian Irvine is a composer from Northern Ireland. His work has been characterized as avant-garde, incorporating elements of "free jazz, rock, rap, thrash, tango, lounge and contemporary classical" music. Irvine was Associate Composer with the Ulster Orchestra (2007–2011) and Professor of Creative Arts at the University of Ulster.
The Kronos Quartet is an American string quartet based in San Francisco. It has been in existence with a rotating membership of musicians for almost 50 years. The quartet covers a very broad range of musical genres, including contemporary classical music. More than 900 works have been written for it.
Edgar Meyer is an American bassist and composer. His styles include classical, bluegrass, newgrass, and jazz. He has won five Grammy Awards and been nominated seven times.
Osvaldo Noé Golijov is an Argentine composer of classical music and music professor, known for his vocal and orchestral work.
The state of Maine is located in the New England region of the northeastern United States. Its musical traditions extend back thousands of years to the music of the first peoples of Maine, the Penobscot Passamaquoddy, Wabanaki and other related Indigenous cultures.
Aulis Sallinen is a Finnish contemporary classical music composer. His music has been variously described as "remorselessly harsh", a "beautifully crafted amalgam of several 20th-century styles", and "neo-romantic". Sallinen studied at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Joonas Kokkonen. He has had works commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, and has also written seven operas, eight symphonies, concertos for violin, cello, flute, horn, and English horn, as well as several chamber works. He won the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1978 for his opera Ratsumies.
Samuel Hans Adler is an American composer, conductor, author, and professor. During the course of a professional career which ranges over six decades he has served as a faculty member at both the University of Rochester's Eastman School of Music and the Juilliard School. In addition, he is credited with founding and conducting the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra which participated in the cultural diplomacy initiatives of the United States in Germany and throughout Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Adler's musical catalogue includes over 400 published compositions. He has been honored with several awards including Germany's Order of Merit – Officer's Cross.
Michael Gordon is an American composer and co-founder of the Bang on a Can music collective and festival.
Andy Cutting is an English folk musician and composer. He plays melodeon and is best known for writing and performing traditional English folk and his own original compositions which combine English and French traditions with wider influences. He is three times winner of the Folk Musician of the Year award at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards and has appeared on around 50 albums, both as a solo artist and in collaboration with other musicians. He was born in Harrow, London and is married with three children.
Laurence Crane is a composer of contemporary classical music.
P. Q. Phan, is a Vietnamese composer of contemporary classical music living in the United States. He became interested in music while studying architecture in 1978 and taught himself to play the piano, compose, and orchestrate. In 1982, he immigrated to the United States and began his formal musical training.
The Unthanks are an English folk group known for their eclectic approach in combining traditional English folk, particularly Northumbrian folk music, with other musical genres. Their debut album, Cruel Sister, was Mojo magazine's Folk Album of the Year in 2005. Of their subsequent albums, nine have received four or five-starred reviews in the British national press. Their album Mount the Air, released in 2015, won in the best album category in the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. In 2017 they released two albums featuring the songs and poems of Molly Drake, mother of singer-songwriter and musician Nick Drake.
Nathaniel Stookey is an American composer and musician.
Bryce David Dessner is an American composer and guitarist based in Paris, also known as a member of the rock band the National. Dessner's twin brother Aaron is also a member of the group. Together they write the music, in collaboration with lead singer / lyricist Matt Berninger.
Moulettes are an English art rock band that combines elements of rock, progressive, folk and pop music. The band was formed in 2002 in Glastonbury, England by Hannah Miller, Ruth Skipper, Robert Skipper, Oliver Austin and Ted Dwane.
Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell were a contemporary English folk duo. Although they played some traditional songs, most of the songs they sang were their own compositions influenced by the folk tradition, but also songs by other artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Cole Porter, Brian Wilson and The Beatles.
Sahba Aminikia is an Iranian-American contemporary music composer, artistic director, performer and educator. Born and raised in Tehran and based in San Francisco, California, his musical compositions have been widely performed around the world by contemporary classical ensembles orchestras, and bands, including Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, San Francisco Girls Chorus, Mahsa Vahdat, International Contemporary Ensemble, Carnegie Hall Ensemble Connect, Symphony Parnassus, Ensemble Elefant, ZOFO Duet, San Francisco Conservatory of Music New Music Ensemble, Mobius Trio, Delphi Trio, Amaranth Quartet, Living Earth Show, One Found Sound, and Afghanistan National Institute of Music. Aminikia is the founder and the artistic director of Flying Carpet Festival, a performing arts festival for children in war zones.
Paul Wiancko is an American cellist and composer.
Lawrence Irving Wilde, is a composer, educator, violinist, and nyckelharpa player. Wilde has been commissioned by and collaborated with ensembles such as the Kronos Quartet, Eighth Blackbird, JACK Quartet, ÆON Music Ensemble, Sō Percussion, Tesla Quartet, Aspen Music Festival Orchestra, Moscow String Quartet, Ensemble Mise-En, Juilliard Orchestra, and others.