Peter McGarr is an English classical composer and teacher, working in the English experimental tradition and inspired by Northern English landscape and culture.
McGarr was born in Openshaw, Manchester, and attended Ducie Technical High School for Boys, now Manchester Academy. He studied Music and Dance at Mather College (now part of Manchester University) and is self-taught in composition. For several years he taught steel pan, achieving the Outstanding Performance Award from Music for Youth for his steel band 'Orchestral Steel', appearing in the School Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 1984 [1] and 1986. [2] He has received the Butterworth Prize for Composition from the Society for the Promotion of New Music and has been nominated for Music Teacher of the Year, the British Composer Awards, the Paul Hamlyn foundation Awards and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship. He has led composition workshops at the Edinburgh International Festival [3] and also engaged extensively with musical activities involving the elderly and people with dementia.
McGarr has been influenced by the sounds and changing culture of the Northern English people and landscape. [4] His piece "Hillclouds, Rainwindows and Vanishing Orchestras" has been described as "integrat[ing] tremolo sounds into a subtle patchwork of changing harmonies". [5]
He has received performances and commissions from many leading musicians, orchestras and festivals including the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, [6] London Sinfonietta, [7] Joanna MacGregor, [8] Ensemble Bash, [4] Three Strange Angels, [9] Passacaglia, [10] oboeworks, [11] Cappella Nova, [12] The Crossing, [13] Kevin Bowyer, [14] Ruth Morley, [15] and Emily Andrews. [16]
He was commissioned by the Tallis Festival to write a 40-part companion piece to Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium . The resulting work, Lindisfarne Love Song (also called Love You Big as the Sky) included poems about Lindisfarne, diary notes and the detailed geography of the area including shipwrecks and lighthouses. An on-line campaign has since started, Lybats, to secure a performance of the piece on its "spiritual home" of Lindisfarne. [17]
The Bath International Music Festival commissioned its largest ever piece; a choral work from McGarr, to celebrate the festival's 60th anniversary. The work was Homesongs and scored for over a 1,000 voices. [18]
McGarr won the 2013–14 British Composer Awards (Making Music Category) for his piece Dry Stone Walls of Yorkshire, written for orchestra with soundtrack and features field recordings made on Saddleworth Moor. [19]
John Harris Harbison is an American composer and academic.
Steven Edward Stucky was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Chen Yi is a Chinese-American composer of contemporary classical music and violinist. She was the first Chinese woman to receive a Master of Arts (M.A.) in music composition from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Chen was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Music for her composition Si Ji, and has received awards from the Koussevistky Music Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2010, she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The New School and in 2012, she was awarded the Brock Commission from the American Choral Directors Association. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2019.
Sarah Frances Beamish is a British composer and violist. Her works include chamber, vocal, choral and orchestral music. She has also worked in the field of music, theatre, film and television, as well as composing for children and for her local community.
Simon Holt is an English composer.
Donald Henry Kay AM is an Australian classical composer.
Gary Alan Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002.
Anthony John Whittaker-Mahoney is an English composer. His first musical experiences were in the local church choir age 7 and as a tenor recorder player; he did not begin formal study of the piano until 1982 with Peter Wild. Lessons with Ann Bond on the organ followed in 1986. After acquiring the LRAM diploma in 1989, ARCO and LTCL in 1991, he graduated from the University of London in 1994 BMus (hons).
Rebecca Saunders is a London-born composer who lives and works freelance in Berlin. In a 2017 Classic Voice poll of the greatest works of art music since 2000, Saunders' compositions received the third highest total number of votes (30), surpassed only by the works of Georg Friedrich Haas (49) and Simon Steen-Andersen (35). In 2019, writers of The Guardian ranked Skin (2016) the 16th greatest work of art music since 2000, with Tom Service writing that "Saunders burrows into the interior world of the instruments, and inside the grain of Fraser's voice [...] and finds a revelatory world of heightened feeling."
Lidia Zielińska is a Polish composer and music educator.
Helen Grime is a Scottish composer of contemporary classical music. Her work, Virga, was selected as one of the best ten new classical works of the 2000s by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
Derrick Skye is a composer, conductor, musician, and educator based in the Los Angeles area who often integrates musical practices from cultures around the world in his works. The Los Angeles Times has described Skye's music as "something to savor" and "enormous fun to listen to." The Times (London) described Skye’s music as “deliciously head-spinning.”
Allan Gordon Bell, is a Canadian contemporary classical composer.
Graham Whettam was an English post-romantic composer.
This is a summary of 1931 in music in the United Kingdom.
Joseph Phibbs is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals, for private sponsors, and for the BBC, which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award, and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.
Michael Seltenreich is an Israeli composer of contemporary classical music based in New York City. He is known for his distinctive, rhythmically captivating and technically sophisticated music, blending elements of modernism and experimentation. His works have been performed by leading ensembles and orchestras around the world, including the Munich Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Juilliard Orchestra. He earned commissions from staple institutions such as Lucerne Festival, Aspen Music Festival, and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Seltenreich was the first Israeli to win the prestigious Toru Takemitsu Composition Award and is a recipient of the Israel Prime Minister Award in Composition. In 2022, he received the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Zosha Di Castri is a Canadian composer and pianist living and working in New York. She is the Francis Goelet Assistant Professor of Music at Columbia University. Her work came to international attention when a specially commissioned piece about the lunar landings opened the BBC Proms 2019.
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