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Iain Bell

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iain Bell (born 1980) is an English composer whose output is predominantly of vocal works, namely opera, art song or orchestral song. Life and career Bell was born in London. His first opera, A Harlot’s Progress, to a libretto by Peter Ackroyd, premiered on 13 October 2013 at the in Vienna, conducted by Mikko Franck and directed by Jens-Daniel Herzog. The cast included Marie McLaughlin as Mother Needham and Nathan Gunn as James Dalton. The lead role of Moll Hackabout was created by German coloratura soprano Diana Damrau for whom the composer has written a great deal of music. Bell’s second opera is an adaptation of Charles Dickens’s own one-man version of his novella A Christmas Carol commissioned by Houston Grand Opera where it received its world premiere in December 2014, directed by the British actor, director and writer Simon Callow, sung by the American tenor Jay Hunter Morris. It had its UK premiere at Welsh National Opera in a new production by Polly Graham in December 2015. Bell’s third opera is an adaptation of the 1937 First World War epic poem In Parenthesis by David Jones. It was commissioned by Welsh National Opera and received its world premiere in May 2016 at the Wal

Iain Burnside

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iain Burnside is a Scottish classical pianist and accompanist, and an occasional presenter on BBC Radio 3. Following study at Merton College, Oxford, the Royal Academy of Music and the Chopin Academy, in Warsaw he became a freelance pianist, specialising particularly in song repertoire. He has collaborated with many singers, and was particularly close friends with the late soprano Susan Chilcott. Burnside is the godfather of Chilcott’s son, Hugh, and following her death in 2003 became his legal guardian. Other singers he has worked and recorded with include Dame Margaret Price, Galina Gorchakova,Lawrence Brownlee, Rosa Feola and Roderick Williams, with whom he has recorded the complete Finzi baritone songs,. After presenting the Cardiff Singer of the World competition, he became a presenter on Radio 3, for many years fronting the weekly song-orientated show Voices for which he won a Sony Radio Award. Later he began presenting the Sunday morning programme. He has also written various musical plays: A Soldier and a Maker on the life of Ivor Gurney, premiered in 2012 and later broadcast on. BBC Radio 3; Shining Armour on Clara Schumann; Why does the Queen Die? and Swansong on Franz Sc

Iain Chambers (musician)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iain Chambers is an English composer, producer and performer. Iain has composed and performed since the 1990s. He formed the duo Bow Mods with Philip Clayton Smith, releasing an album and 2 EPs on Drunken Records. He produced programmes at BBC Radio 3 between 1999 and 2007, including Andy Kershaw and Late Junction. With Kershaw he made programmes in Algeria, Mali, Corsica and Sardinia, winning a Gold award for best Specialist Music Programme at the Radio Academy Awards in 2003. In 2003, with Radio 3 colleagues Felix Carey and Philip Tagney, he co-founded musique concrète collective Langham Research Centre. The trio sought to breathe new life into experiments with reel-to-reel tape, producing two editions of Between The Ears: Gateshead Multistorey Carpark, and guest+host=ghost written by and starring Peter Blegvad, and featuring Nick Cave. In 2005 the trio were joined by Robert Worby, and began to perform new realisations of work by John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Christian Wolff and others, using their instrumentarium of obsolete analogue equipment, alongside their own new music made from the same sources. Iain won a second Radio Academy award for his 2011 radiophonic drama written by Pet

Iain Grandage

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iain Andrew Grandage is an Australian composer and music director, best known for his compositions for theatre, dance and concert. In May 2018, the Perth Festival appointed Grandage as artistic director. Early life Grandage initially lived in Brisbane, before moving to Perth when he was seven. Grandage studied at the UWA School of Music (now the UWA Conservatorium of Music) as a cellist, and also studied composition with Roger Smalley. Awards and honours He has received the Helpmann Award for Best Original Score multiple times, for play Cloudstreet in 2002, play The Secret River in 2013, dance work When Time Stops in 2014, opera The Rabbits (with Kate Miller-Heidke) in 2015, and concert work Satan Jawa (with Rahayu Supanggah) in 2017. Grandage received the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award for an individual in 2012. He delivered one of the 2024 Boyer Lectures. In the 2025 King’s Birthday Honours, Grandage was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia, for significant service to the arts as a composer and artistic director. References

Iain Hamilton (composer)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iain Ellis Hamilton (6 June 1922 – 21 July 2000) was a prolific Scottish composer of ten operas, four symphonies, four string quartets and much more. He worked in the United States for twenty years. Career Hamilton was born in Glasgow and educated in London, where he became an apprentice engineer. He remained in that profession for the next seven years, studying music in his spare time. In 1947 he won a scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Music for three years, studying composition with William Alwyn and piano with Harold Craxton. Simultaneously he earned a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of London (1950), and he was later awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from the University of Glasgow (1970). In 1951 Hamilton became a lecturer at both Morley College and the University of London, posts he held until 1960, when he moved to New York. There he was appointed Mary Duke Biddle Professor at Duke University, North Carolina. In 1971 he was also appointed to the Cramb lectureship at the University of Glasgow. He returned to London in 1981, but struggled to regain a place in the mainstream of UK musical life, although his orchestral work Commedia was performed at the

Ian Cugley

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Cugley (22 June 19454 November 2010) was an Australian composer. Biography Early life He was born in Melbourne in 1945. He gained early prominence with two orchestral works, Pan, the Lake and Prelude for Orchestra, which were performed by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1967 and subsequently recorded on EMI. His career after then was less spectacular, and he had a propensity for hiding away and concentrating on composition without seeming overly concerned with performance. He rarely attended performances of his music unless they happened to be close at hand. Career He lectured in Music and Computing at the University of Tasmania for many years, including a period in charge of the small Music department there, and was a percussionist with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. During his time in Tasmania he wrote mainly chamber music, usually on commission for bodies or performers outside Tasmania. A notable exception is the Violin Concerto commissioned by the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music for Jan Sedivka, who was soloist at the first performance in 1980 (with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by Patrick Thomas). Cugley left Tasmania

Ian Cusson

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Cusson (born August 24, 1981) is a Canadian composer of Georgian Bay Métis and French Canadian descent. He is known for his operas, art songs, chamber works and orchestral music. Career Cusson came to prominence in 2017, when he was awarded one of two prestigious new Carrefour residencies for “culturally diverse or Indigenous composers” with the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada. Notable operatic works include Fantasma, with text by Colleen Murphy, and Of the Sea with text by Kanika Ambrose. In 2021, Cusson was the recipient of SOCAN’s Jan V. Matejcek Classical Music Award and the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize. The Canadian Opera Company and the National Arts Centre have announced that Cusson has been commissioned to compose an opera based on the novel Empire of Wild by Cherie Dimaline as part of their 2025 mainstage season. Cusson is a member of the Canadian Opera Company’s Circle of Artists, an advisory board of indigenous artists. In late November 2025, Edmonton Opera announced the cancellation of the premiere of Cusson’s forthcoming opera Indians on Vacation, after concerns were raised by local Indigenous representatives of Treaty 6 Nations about the indigene

Ian Keith Harris

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Keith Harris (24 June 1936 – 3 April 2024) was an Australian composer of classical music, arranger, oboist, critic and music educator. Life and career Ian Keith Harris was born in Melbourne, living there for the first 26 years of his life. He started the piano at the age of five, playing cornet in his school band, then violin for a couple of years at high school, and later was a school pianist. In 1952, he began his Bachelor of Music degree at Melbourne University Conservatorium of Music, taking piano as chief study and oboe as second. Later, he changed to oboe as his chief study and studied composition with Jiři Tancibudek and Arthur Nickson. He was soon in demand as a freelance orchestral musician, arranger and copyist, working in a very eclectic mix of musical spheres from arrangement for television and various theatrical shows to playing in opera, ballet, chamber music and symphony orchestras. He was a founding member of the Glendenian Trio (flute, oboe, bassoon), which gave regular broadcasts over several years. The trio was another area in which his arrangement skills were frequently employed. He served some years as an oboist for J. C. Williamson theatres, playing musica

Ian Kellam

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

NOTOC Ian Kellam (1933 – 24 November 2014) was a British composer of church music and theatre music. Kellam was born in Sheffield and was a chorister at Sheffield Cathedral under Reginald Tustin Baker, organist. He went on to study with Herbert Sumsion at Gloucester Cathedral, and then with Howard Ferguson at the Royal Academy of Music. He taught privately, and at the London College of Music, where his students included Roger Marsh. He composed a series of nine choral orchestral cantatas (the last in 2001), many smaller choral works for the church, and settings of the morning and evening canticles. Eighteen of his hymn tunes were collected in the volume Sing Praise to God (2005). Kellam wrote theatre music for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for the Chichester Festival and for Joan Littlewood. His music was used in productions staged in Moscow, Paris and New York. The Young Visitors, a musical based on the book by Daisy Ashford with a book by Michael Ashton and music by Kellam, was produced in 1968 at the Piccadilly Theatre, where it ran for 68 performances. There were also stage works for children, including The Journey, with a libretto by David Gribble. Balaam, for children’s

Ian Livingstone (composer)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Paul Livingstone (born 4 July 1969, in London) is a British composer for television, films and video games. He jointly won an Ivor Novello Award in 2011 for a video game score for Napoleon: Total War. He is best known as the composer of the F1 video game series. He was classically trained from the age of five and has a background as a pop/dance music producer, band member and session musician. He is a graduate of Salford University. Work Video games Television and film He has composed for television for: * Big Fat Gypsy Weddings * The Great British Sewing Bee * The Repair Shop * Francesco’s Mediterranean Voyage The Expendabelles Other He has also produced songs, advertising jingles, movie scores and orchestrations. He also worked with Nokia during 2000 to 2004, creating polyphonic arrangements of monophonic ringtones, including the Nokia tune, References External links *Ian Livingstone’s web-site

Ian Mulder

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Mulder () is a Dutch-born pianist and composer, who lives in Orlando, Florida. He performs in the United States and Europe, playing the piano and conducting an orchestra simultaneously, and has 20 solo albums to his name. His 7-album inspirational album series Love Divine, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and London Philharmonic Orchestra are popular in over 20 countries and have achieved gold and platinum status. Biography Mulder was born in Rotterdam; he studied piano, organ and composition at the Rotterdam and Utrecht conservatories. Since graduating in 1992, Ian Mulder composes music for his solo albums and concerts. His piano albums, recorded with symphony orchestras in London and Moscow, are frequently played on SiriusXM, Classic FM and other stations. In 2013, he recorded his second album with the London Symphony Orchestra, Love Divine, which reached platinum status 10 weeks from its release date. That same album was nominated for the 2014 GMA Dove Awards: Instrumental Album of the Year. His 2014 album with the London Symphony Orchestra, named Christmas, featured Andrea Bocelli singing “A choir of a thousand angels”. In 2021, his

Ian Munro (pianist)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Munro (born 1963) is an Australian pianist, composer, and music educator. His career has taken him to many countries in Europe, Asia, North America, and Australasia. Early life and education Ian Munro attended Scotch College in Melbourne for his high school education. He then attended the Victorian College of the Arts (1981–83). His early piano training was in Melbourne with Rodney Hurst, Marta Rostas (a pupil of Béla Bartók), Deirdre Vadas and Roy Shepherd (a pupil of Alfred Cortot) and he had further study in Vienna, London and Italy with Franz Zettl, Noretta Conci, Guido Agosti, and Michele Campanella. ) and he also has a special interest in new music. He has premiered or commissioned works by Peter Sculthorpe, Elena Kats-Chernin (her second piano concerto), Gordon Kerry, Ann Ghandar, Raffaele Marcellino, Ross Edwards and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, from whom he commissioned the piano cycle Silhouettes. These pieces were dedicated to significant 20th-century composers such as Debussy, Gershwin, Ives, Ravel, Schnittke, Stravinsky – and John Cage, which in true Cage style consisted of 33 seconds of silence. During his time in Hobart he created and played a series of four recitals,

Ian Vine

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Vine (born 3 January 1974 in Portsmouth, England) is a British composer. Vine grew up in Libya and Hong Kong. He studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music with Anthony Gilbert and privately with Simon Holt. There are traces Near and Far Eastern modalities as well as gestural and formal elements in his music. SIRI (1997), for solo percussion with electronics, uses a rhythmic and structural language found in the highly ritualised percussion music of Japan and Korea. writing on water (1999-), commissioned by Matthew Herbert and released on the Accidental label, is an expanding collection of short (sometimes only 20 seconds long) works using recorded acoustic instruments; and shadow grounds (1999), commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival for the ensemble recherche as part of their In Nomine Broken Consort Book, a three-minute non-miniature of suspended sound. His three black moons (1999), commissioned by the London Sinfonietta, was described by The Guardian, ‘…the most striking piece takes its title from an Alexander Calder mobile - its magical floating sonorities had a Feldmanesque beauty.’ The Guardian has written of him that “Vine’s music,

Ian Whyte (conductor)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Whyte (13 August 1901 – 27 March 1960) was a Scottish conductor and composer, and founder of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Born in Dunfermline, Whyte studied in London, and was a pupil of Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music. which Warrack conducted for the first ten years. Whyte took over as conductor in 1945 and stayed until 1960. He appointed young assistants to help with the orchestra that went on to be very influential in their own right: Alexander Gibson, Colin Davis and Bryden Thomson. His own considerable output of compositions and arrangements includes the ballet Donald of the Burthens (produced at Covent Garden in 1951), influenced by Scottish themes and folk tunes. The Scottish Music Information Centre holds 668 Whyte manuscripts, mostly unplayed. He died in Glasgow, March 27, 1960. Selected works Opera * Comala * The Forge * The Tale of the Shepherds Ballet *Goblin Haa * The Trout * Donald of the Burthens Orchestral * Symphony No. 1 (1949) * Symphony No. 2 * Edinburgh, symphonic poem (1945) * Tam O’Shanter, symphonic poem * The Rose Garden, symphonic poem * The Treadmill, overture * Oragif, overture * Concert Overture * Dunfermlin

Ian Wilson (composer)

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ian Wilson (born 26 December 1964) is an Irish composer. Career Wilson was born in Belfast, studied violin and piano, and graduated with a DPhil in composition from the University of Ulster at Jordanstown in 1990, where he was a research fellow, 2000–3. He has been a composer-in-residence with Leitrim County Council and was music director of the Sligo New Music Festival from 2003 to 2011. He received the Macaulay Fellowship from the Arts Council of Ireland in 1992, and in 1998 he was elected to Aosdána, Ireland’s academy of creative artists. Since 2009, he has been a post-doctoral research fellow at Dundalk Institute of Technology, investigating aspects of traditional (ethnic) Irish performance practice as a basis for new works of art music. Wilson’s music has been performed at the BBC Proms, Venice Biennale, ISCM World Music Days and the Ultima Festival in Oslo and by such diverse groups as the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the London Mozart Players, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the pianist Hugh Tinney and many others. He has recorded many albums, including two releases for Diatribe Records. Recordings Bibliography * Axel Klein: Die Musik Irlands im 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim:

Iancu Dumitrescu

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Iancu Dumitrescu (born 15 July 1944) is a Romanian avant-garde composer. Life and works Dumitrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania. He received a master’s degree in composition in Bucharest, where his teachers included Alfred Mendelsohn. Later, he studied conducting and philosophy with Sergiu Celibidache, who led Dumitrescu to engage with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and apply the principles of phenomenology to music. He began composing his mature works in the early 1970s. In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, which he describes as “a multimedia group dedicated to experimental music”. Several of Dumitrescu’s early works for solo contrabass were recorded by the noted avant-garde bassist Fernando Grillo. Dumitrescu has composed a large body of works for acoustic instruments and ensembles as well as works combining acoustic and electronic sounds and works composed entirely using tape or computer. In its emphasis on long tones that undergo transformations of timbre, Dumitrescu’s music can be loosely grouped with that of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi and with the spectral music of fellow Romanian Horațiu Rădulescu and the French composers of the spectral school. Dumitrescu describ

Iannis Xenakis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Giannis Klearchou Xenakis (also spelled for professional purposes as Yannis or Iannis Xenakis; , ; 29 May 1922 – 4 February 2001) was a Romanian-born Greek-French avant-garde composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalised citizen of France eighteen years later. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances. Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953–54) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis’s UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes, that were a summa of his intere