Between 1983 and 1986, Eastop trained as a teacher of the Alexander Technique and from 1987 taught this discipline for four years, later incorporating his understanding of the technique into his brass teaching method.[3] He contributed to the chapter on 'Playing, learning and teaching brass' in the Cambridge Companion to Brass Instruments.[4]
Eastop was a professor of horn at the Royal Academy of Music from 1993 to 2007 and at the Royal College of Music from 1995 to 2019. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 2000.[5]
In 1996, the Arts Council of Great Britain awarded Eastop a research development grant to explore "the possibilities of controlling computer-driven transformation of sound during live, partially improvised performance". This work was undertaken in collaboration with the composer Edward Williams.[9] Eastop's interest in music technology subsequently led him to create his own piece for solo horn and loopstation, Sea Bells, which he premiered at the British Horn Festival in 2011.[10]
His recording of the Mozart horn concertos with Anthony Halstead and the Hanover Band was released in 2015.[11] Reviews of this album praised Eastop's 'refined legato' (Gramophone) and 'cheeky virtuosity' (The Arts Desk), while his cadenzas were described by one reviewer as 'wild and wacky' (Financial Times).[12][13][14] These cadenzas were published in 2024 by Clifton Edition.[15]
Eastop's next recording project was a two-album series of improvisations for horn and organ with Susanne Kujala in the Organo hall of Helsinki Music Centre. Captured live at the first ever Brass @ Sibelius Academy festival in June 2016,[16] this collaboration was an experiment in what Eastop calls "co-composing in realtime, 'writing' not with pen and paper but instead with microphones and digital recording media".[17][18]
He went on to collaborate again with Anthony Halstead for his 2020 album Set the Wild Echoes Flying, a seven-movement work for natural horn and narrator that features four poems and extensive musical allusions from Britten's Serenade.[19][20] This recording has been lauded as 'utterly remarkable' and a 'superhuman achievement' (Classical Explorer).[21]
Eastop retired from playing the horn in 2022 to concentrate on composing and producing.[22] He appears as trumpet/flugelhorn soloist on three tracks from the 2024 album 1325 Ibn Battutah by UK-Middle Eastern band Syriana, and was commissioned by London's Fitzrovia Arts Festival to write a new work for oboe and fixed media that premiered in June 2025.[23][24]
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
