Patrick Harrex (born 1946, in London) is a British contemporary classical music composer based in Brighton.
Contemporary classical music can be understood as belonging to the period that started in the mid-1970s to early 1990s, which includes modernist, postmodern, neoromantic, and pluralist music. However, the term may also be employed in a broader sense to refer to all post-1945 musical forms.
A composer is a musician who is an author of music in any form, including vocal music, instrumental music, electronic music, and music which combines multiple forms. A composer may create music in any music genre, including, for example, classical music, musical theatre, blues, folk music, jazz, and popular music. Composers often express their works in a written musical score using musical notation.
Brighton is a seaside resort on the south coast of England that is part of the City of Brighton and Hove, located 47 miles (76 km) south of London.
Harrex studied Music & Education at York University and won first prize in the 1968 BBC Composers’ Competition. His Sonata for female voice, flute and percussion, published by Schott was written in 1966 and in 1968 he was commissioned by the Decca Record Company to write a work for children (Narnian Suite) for ‘Voices’, recorded on the Argo label.
York University is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is Canada's third-largest university, and it has approximately 52,300 students, 7,000 faculty and staff, and 295,000 alumni worldwide. It has eleven faculties, including the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, Faculty of Science, Lassonde School of Engineering, Schulich School of Business, Osgoode Hall Law School, Glendon College, Faculty of Education, Faculty of Health, Faculty of Environmental Studies, Faculty of Graduate Studies, the School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, and 28 research centres. The Keele campus is also home to a satellite location of Seneca College.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters are at Broadcasting House in Westminster, London, and it is the world's oldest national broadcasting organisation and the largest broadcaster in the world by number of employees. It employs over 20,950 staff in total, 16,672 of whom are in public sector broadcasting. The total number of staff is 35,402 when part-time, flexible, and fixed-contract staff are included.
For the American label, see Argo Records
Early success came when "Antiphonies", written for the Portia Ensemble, was premiered at the Purcell Room in November 1967, with the composer conducting. In 1968 he was featured in BBC Radio 3’s ‘Youth at the Helm’.
The Purcell Room is a concert and performance venue which forms part of the Southbank Centre, one of central London's leading cultural complexes. It is named after the 17th century English composer Henry Purcell and has 370 seats. The Purcell Room has hosted a wide range of chamber music, jazz, mime and poetry recitals. In the context of the Southbank Centre it is the smallest of a set of three venues, the other two being the Royal Festival Hall, a large symphony hall, and the QEH, which is used for orchestral, chamber and contemporary amplified music.
BBC Radio 3 is a British radio station operated by the BBC. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station describes itself as 'the world's most significant commissioner of new music', and through its New Generation Artists scheme promotes young musicians of all nationalities. The station broadcasts the BBC Proms concerts, live and in full, each summer in addition to performances by the BBC Orchestras and Singers. There are regular productions of both classic plays and newly commissioned drama.
Whilst at York he was also a founder member of Gentle Fire , which became one of the leading groups performing experimental and live electronic music.
Electronic music is music that employs electronic musical instruments, digital instruments and circuitry-based music technology. In general, a distinction can be made between sound produced using electromechanical means, and that produced using electronics only. Electromechanical instruments include mechanical elements, such as strings, hammers, and so on, and electric elements, such as magnetic pickups, power amplifiers and loudspeakers. Examples of electromechanical sound producing devices include the telharmonium, Hammond organ, and the electric guitar, which are typically made loud enough for performers and audiences to hear with an instrument amplifier and speaker cabinet. Pure electronic instruments do not have vibrating strings, hammers, or other sound-producing mechanisms. Devices such as the theremin, synthesizer, and computer can produce electronic sounds.
Harrex was awarded a French Government Scholarship, which enabled him to spend a year in Paris after graduating from York in 1968; here he attended Olivier Messiaen’s composition class at the Conservatoire and studied privately with Gilbert Amy. Prior to this, during the summer of 1967, he had attended a brief course in composition given by the Belgian composer Henri Pousseur.
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist, one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex; harmonically and melodically he employs a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material generated by his early compositions and improvisations. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, vocal music, as well as for solo organ and piano, and also experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Henri Pousseur was a Belgian composer, teacher, and music theorist.
Harrex has twice been a shortlisted composer with SPNM (The Society for the Promotion of New Music) and in 2003 won second prize in the Luxembourg International Composition Prize with Hauptweg und Nebenwege.
The Society for the Promotion of New Music (SPNM), originally named The Committee for the Promotion of New Music, was founded January 1943 in London by Francis Chagrin, to promote the creation and performance of new music by young and unestablished composers. Since 1993 it had awarded the annual Butterworth Prize for Composition. In 2008, it merged with three other networks to form Sound and Music.
His works are performed widely, live and on radio, and commercially recorded not only in the UK but also in continental Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia.
Harrex is also involved in encouraging interest in new music by young people and amateur musicians – he currently holds positions as Composer in Residence at two schools in Sussex, and in 2005 he established the Sussex branch of CoMA (Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs). He was a founder member and is a past chairman of New Music Brighton, a collective of composers living or working in the Sussex area. He is co-founder, with Claudia Molitor, and Chair of Trustees of Soundwaves Festival.
