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. His music inhabits a world of seasonal rituals, regional myth and historical-personal memories. [4] He uses theatre, extended techniques and everyday sounds to 'Sustain rapt melody that seems to scrutinise the tintinnabulations of nature for signs of hope or doom'. [5] His musical style 'Integrates tremolo sounds into a subtle patchwork of changing harmonies.' [6] He follows in a long tradition of British artists and poets who have interpreted the British people and landscape.
He has received performances and commissions from many leading musicians, orchestras and festivals including the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, [7] BBC Philharmonic, London Sinfonietta (Conductor Pierre Andre Valade), [8] Joanna MacGregor, [9] Ensemble Bash, [4] Three Strange Angels, [10] Passacaglia, [11] oboeworks, [12] Cappella Nova, [13] The Crossing (USA), [14] Tempest Flute Trio, Kevin Bowyer, [15] Ruth Morley, [16] Emily Andrews, [17] Sarah Field, [18] Brodsky Quartet, Tubalate,. [19]
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. [20]
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. [21]
Recent projects include a video piece for Ensemble Bash, 'The Acoustics of Morecambe Bay.
His music is published by Faber Music. [9]
He 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. [22]
Isang Yun, or Yun I-sang, was a Korean-born composer who made his later career in West Germany.
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.
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