In 1949, Ned Rorem moved to France, where he lived until 1958, and where his charm and outrageous behaviour soon established him as a name to watch. At a time when twelve-note music was sweeping through Paris he was famously rude about it and resolutely wrote tonal music. He is also well-known for his books and diaries which are noted for being "worldly, intelligent, licentious and highly indiscreet."

Currently living in New York City and Nantucket, Ned Rorem is a Quaker ("philosophically though not religiously"), a free-thinker, dissenter as well as a composer of refined and elegant music. His compositions include many orchestral works (including three symphonies and four piano concertos), music for numerous combinations of chamber forces, six operas, choral works of every description, ballets and other music for the theatre, and literally hundreds of songs and cycles. Indeed, Time Magazine has called him "the world’s best composer of art songs".

When Ned Rorem turned 75 in 1998, leading the birthday-year celebrations was the premiere by the New York Festival of Song of his evening-length song cycle for four singers and piano, Evidence of Things Not Seen. Consisting of 36 songs, the three-part cycle represents the composer’s magnum opus in the medium, and was described by New York magazine as "one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs I have ever heard by any American composer".

Of his work, Ned Rorem has said, "My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise. I don’t believe that composers notate their moods, they don’t tell the music where to go – it leads them … Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it – it’s simple as that. Others may have more talent, more sense of duty. But I compose just from necessity, and no-one else is making what I need."

www.nedrorem.com

Born in 1968, he studied composition at the University of Sydney and at the University of Melbourne with composers including Peter Sculthorpe, Eric Gross, Brenton Broadstock, and Ross Edwards. A viola player and string teacher as well as a composer, his works have been performed by ensembles and orchestras throughout his native Australia, including most of its professional symphony orchestras and chamber groups, and extensively overseas, including presentations at such key events as the 1994 and 2000 Gaudeamus Music Weeks in Amsterdam, the 1997 ISCM Festival in Copenhagen and the 1998 Paris Composers Rostrum.

His music often displays influences of popular music styles within a classical music context, and as a result musical elements such as driving repeated rhythms and loud dynamic levels are typically found in his works. Indeed, directness and immediacy are common features in the much of his music. In 1999 he was the attached composer to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Works written during this period include Boom-Box and In Memoriam: Amplified Cello Concerto (the latter was subsequently nominated for an APRA-AMC award for Best Orchestral Work of 2001). He was also the attached composer with the Sydney Youth Orchestra in the same year, for whom he was commissioned to write a Violin Concerto.

In 2002 he was the featured composer with Musica Viva Australia for whom he has written a number of new commissions for Kristjan Järvi’s Absolute Ensemble, baroque violinist Andrew Manze, the Australian Virtuosi, Diana Doherty and the Belcea String Quartet, and Duo Sol. Other achievements include works for the Queensland Orchestra with the Goldner String Quartet – The Rave and the Nightingale; Musica Viva Australia – Rush; Slava Grigoryan and the Goldner Quartet – Whitewater; (all three of which can be heard on Tuesday 9 September); the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra – Headbanger; and for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Choir – Heartland.

In May 2002, the Sydney Dance Company toured Australia to much acclaim with a new 90-minute production, Ellipse, choreographed by their Artistic Director, Graeme Murphy, and danced entirely to Matthew Hindson’s music. Playing to packed houses it broke box-office records for the company. Current projects include A Symphony of Modern Objects commissioned by Ars Musica Australis for the Australian Youth Orchestra, and premiered at the Sydney Opera House in July; his first numbered string quartet for the Goldner String Quartet; a flute concerto; a work for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra; and a music theatre piece based upon the life of Baron Ferdinand von Mueller, founder of the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.

www.fabermusic.co.uk
www.matthewhindson.com
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Since 1975 he has worked as a freelance composer based in London and touring world-wide. As a pianist he has performed at numerous international festivals and his duo Montague/Mead Piano Plus (formed 1985 with pianist Philip Mead) has toured and recorded throughout Europe, Scandinavia and North America. He also collaborates with sculptor Maurice Agis, creating electronic sound environments for Agis's giant inflatable sculptures Colourspace and Dreamspace.

Stephen Montague enjoys a busy schedule of composing, touring and teaching. He was Associate Composer with the Orchestra of St John's Smith Square, London, for the 1995-96 and 1996-97 seasons and was recently a featured composer at the Time of Music Festival (Vitasaari, Finland). For the 1997 BT Celebration Series he wrote a large piece for narrator and orchestra, which was premiered by the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Centre and went on to receive 14 further performances throughout the UK by other leading British orchestras. The work, entitled The Creatures Indoors, sets poems by Jo Shapcott. He was also the Artistic Director of 'SPNM - promoting new music' in 1998-1999.

The celebrated pianist, Stephen Kovacevich, gave the world premiere of a new solo piano work, Southern Lament, at the Cheltenham International Festival of Music in July 1997. The piece has subsequently received performances in Italy, USA, at the Royal Festival Hall, London, and as part of the 1997 BBC Proms Chamber Music Series. His Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, commissioned for the 1997 BBC Proms, was given its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall, London, with soloist Rolf Hind and the Orchestra of St John's, Smith Square.

www.ump.co.uk/montague.htm
www.composers21.com

Born in 1958, Peter Reynolds studied in Cardiff where he now lives and works. During the 1980s he received several bursaries to attend the Dartington Summer School where he studied with the late Morton Feldman and was awarded the Michael Tippett Award for Composition in 1986. His first large-scale commission, a work for chamber orchestra, was completed in 1987 for the Dartington Summer School. Around the same time he co-founded the Ixion new music ensemble and in 1990 formed the Cardiff-based PM Music Ensemble which he still runs.

In addition to his work as a composer, Peter Reynolds is a writer on music, Artistic Director of the Lower Machen Festival and a member of the music staff at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff.

Born in Utrecht in 1939 into a musical family, Louis Andriessen’s father Hendrik, and his brother Jurriaan were established composers at their own right. From a background of jazz and avant-garde composition, Louis Andriessen has evolved a style employing elemental harmonic, melodic and rhythmic materials, heard in totally distinctive instrumentation, and today he is the greatest living Dutch composer.

Born in England in 1962, John Godfrey studied composition with Oliver Knussen and Michael Finnissy at the Royal College of Music in London. He obtained a BA Mus and an MPhil in Composition at the University of York and studied composition and conducting under Peter Maxwell Davies and John Carewe at the Dartington Summer School. In 1989 he co-founded Icebreaker, a London-based new music ensemble, and was its musical director for eight years. Playing keyboards, electric guitar and electric bass, he performed with the group throughout Europe and the USA and recorded a number of CDs. Icebreaker performed many of his works and arrangements.

In 1997 he was a founding member of the Crash Ensemble, a Dublin-based new music group with whom he plays piano and electric guitar. The Irish premiere of Differing Sobriety (written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars) was given by the Crash Ensemble in Dublin in 2000. Since 1993 John Godfrey has been a lecturer in music at the National University of Ireland, Cork, where he has he has been active in founding the first MIDI studio in an Irish university and forming the University's new music ensemble and the Cork Festival of New Music.

His music is published by Carl Fischer, C. Alan Publications, Southern Music Co., and Skitter Music Publications.

Born in 1943 in Sydney, Ross Edwards is one of Australia’s leading composers and was a featured composer at the Festival in 2001. He has created a style unmistakably his own by distilling characteristic sounds from the natural environment and using them as compositional material. The result is music of crystalline starkness evoking the essential sound and feel of Australia’s eastern seaboard. He sees music as a positive and regenerative force within society, a philosophy that has led him to explore beyond the confines of Western Art music.

Born in 1958, the music of Errollyn Wallen embraces the sounds and rhythms of the world around us. She has a wide-ranging aesthetic and her music encompasses genres and redefines forms, including those of orchestral, electronic and chamber music, ballet, opera, song and theatre. Her music has been performed in concert halls, nightclubs, cathedrals, warehouses, power stations pubs, theatres and on radio and television.

Formal studies in music composition were at London and Cambridge Universities, England. Errollyn Wallen has been commissioned by a huge range of performers and organisations, including the BBC, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, the Royal Ballet, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Royal Opera House and Other Minds Festival (San Francisco).

Born in England in 1955, Richard Charlton went to Australia at the age of ten. He started playing the guitar only relatively late in life, at the age of 16, and has remained predominantly self-taught, gaining an LTCL Teachers' Diploma in 1980.

A respected composer for the guitar, Richard Charlton has had works recorded and performed by many leading Australian and international artists. The guitar quartet Dances for the Rainbow Serpent was premiered by the Australian group, Guitar Trek, at the 1992 Adelaide Festival and his guitar solo A Short Walk in a Rainforest was premiered in Paris in 1996.

Recent works include a guitar and percussion piece for Australian guitarist Craig Ogden and a second commission for the Carlos Bonell Ensemble in London. He also frequently writes orchestral and choral works, especially for student groups and amateurs, and is very much concerned with education. He is currently Co-head of Music at Ascham School in Sydney.

www.richardcharlton.com.au

His music has been played by, among others, Ensemble Contrechamps, Ensemble Accroche Note, Tegenwind, the Nieuw Ensemble, the Ives Ensemble, Ixion, Nosferatu and the London Sinfonietta, and has been performed at the major British festivals as well as featured on French and Dutch radio and BBC Radio 3's Hear and Now, Sounding the Century and Music Matters series.

After three years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, Gabriel Jackson, born in 1962, studied composition at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert, gaining his B.Mus in 1983. While at the College he was awarded the R.O. Morris Prize for Composition in 1981 and 1983, and in 1981 he also won the Theodore Holland Award.

One of the leading composers of the younger generation in Australia, Elena Kats-Chernin, Russian-born (in 1957) and educated, worked and trained in Moscow, Germany and Australia. Her distinctive idiom reflects the heady mix of influences across three continents with its chiselled pulsating rhythms crossed with a strong bittersweet melodic and harmonic tinge. Her output is already large and diverse ranging from opera and chamber music to extensive work with film, and was featured in the Festival in 2001. "Her status as one of the century’s most prolific and consistently innovative composers remains unchallenged … (she) appears to achieve the impossible, straddling the two seemingly irreconcilable camps of intellectualism and accessibility." (Sydney Morning Herald)

Nigel Osborne studied composition with Kenneth Leighton, his predecessor as Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, and with Egon Wellesz and Witold Rudzinski, as well as at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, Warsaw. His works have been featured in most major international festivals and performed by many leading orchestras and ensembles around the world, ranging from the Moscow to the Berlin Symphony Orchestras, and from the Philharmonia of London to the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

He has composed extensively for the theatre, with operas and music theatre works for Glyndebourne, English National Opera, Opera Factory, Wuppertal, the Hebbel Theatre, Berlin, the Shakespeare Globe, the Ulysses Theatre, Istria, Radio 3 and BBC2. These include The 7 Last Words, Hell's Angels, The Tempest, King Lear, Terrible Mouth, Sarajevo, Europa, Medea, and The Electrification of the Soviet Union. Other works include Forest-River-Ocean for City of London Festival 2002, a new commission for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, October 2003 and A Song about Love, an evening of music and theatre with Vanessa Redgrave and Birlyant Ramzaeva.

Nigel Osborne has pioneered the use of music in therapy and rehabilitation for children who are victims of conflict, and is consultant for programmes in the Balkans, Caucasus, Africa and the Middle East.

Born in 1969, Lynne Plowman lives and works in Cardiff. Her music has been

performed and broadcast by some of Britain's leading orchestras and ensembles and she has recently completed a year as Composer in Residence for Wingfield Arts in Suffolk. Her first opera, Gwynneth and the Green Knight, to a libretto by Martin Riley, received highly acclaimed performances given by Music Theatre Wales throughout Britain during the last year. She has also recently completed The Stargazer, a new

commission for the London Mozart Players. As a flautist, Lynne Plowman specialises in the performance of twentieth century music and she is an enthusiastic supporter of music in schools, having led workshops for companies including Opera North, Welsh National Opera and Music Theatre Wales.

Born in 1946, Anne Boyd wrote her first compositions as a little girl growing up on a remote outback sheep station in Central Queensland. Later contact with Peter Sculthorpe led to a lifelong fascination with the musical cultures of South East Asia and especially Japan and Indonesia. The hallmarks of her musical style are its transparency, gentleness and delicacy, attributes that reflect her long involvement with Asian traditions. Composition is viewed as essentially spiritual and she sees music as a means of changing states of consciousness. Her music is based on the intersection of Christian love with Buddhist silence, and was previously featured in the Festival in 2001.

Born in March 1953 in London, Anthony Powers studied at Oxford, Paris, and York. He currently lives in Herefordshire where he divides his time between composing and teaching, currently at University of Wales Cardiff where he has been John Bird Composer-in-Residence since 1991. His music is characterised by strong architectonic frameworks which support a language of poetic intensity and magical sonorities, and often takes its inspiration from the tension between different states, be they physical properties, landscapes, seasons or emotions.

His work has been widely performed in the UK and abroad. Important works include the orchestral pieces Stone, Water, Stars (1987) and Terrain (1993), both BBC commissions, as well as two Symphonies, the first of which was performed at the 1996 Proms, and the second of which was for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He has written concertos for cellist Stephen Isserlis and horn player Michael Thompson and his chamber music is frequently performed and broadcast by Britain's top ensembles.

David Sawer studied music at the University of York and subsequently in Cologne with Mauricio Kagel, and in the USA in 1992. While his development as a composer has seen progressively larger-scale forms and forces handled with ever greater assurance, certain features of his style have remained constant. Like Kagel’s, his music frequently possesses a wit which can mask more disturbing elements. Extended passages are built up from the repetition or gradual transformation of tiny melodic fragments, and propelled forwards by rhythms of compelling ingenuity. He often uses simple common chords, though in ways which are disconcertingly novel rather than hackneyed or nostalgic. Textures are uncluttered and incisively articulated. Above all, the impression is of clarity; musical ideas precisely conceived and realised with fastidious craftsmanship.

The 1990s saw a succession of important commissions. The Trumpet Concerto received its first performance from the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1995, and in 1997 the BBC National Orchestra of Wales gave the première of the greatest happiness principle at St David’s Hall, Cardiff and at the Proms. Tiroirs, commissioned by the Michael Vyner Trust for the London Sinfonietta, has been performed throughout Europe, in the USA and at the 1998 ISCM World Music Days.

He has written two operas: the one-act The Panic for the Royal Opera’s Garden Venture, and From Morning to Midnight, a full-length work commissioned by English National Opera, premièred in 2001, and subsequently nominated for the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera. Other recent works include a Piano Concerto for Rolf Hind and Stramm Gedichte, for the New London Chamber Choir and James Wood.

John Metcalf was born in Swansea in 1946. A joint UK/Canadian citizen, he is one of the foremost composers working in Wales today. Starting in the late 1960s, his successful composing career has already embraced a wide variety of work. Major works have marked his development including five operas, two commissioned from Welsh National Opera. His Music Theatre work, Kafka’s Chimp, was premiered in August 1996 in Canada and received its European premiere in Sweden in 1999.

Recent works that display a distinctive style and growing maturity include the lively Marimba Concerto written for Evelyn Glennie and Harp Scrapbook, a musical diary of seven short pieces, and a series of important instrumental pieces including Paradise Haunts and Rest in Reason, Move in Passion. Museum of the Air (1998), a work for large orchestra and mezzo soprano, was first performed by Della Jones and the BBC National Orchestral of Wales in 1998. Dances from Forgotten Places for string orchestra was premiered by the European Chamber Orchestra in February 2000. His song cycle Caneuon y Gerddi was premiered at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, in May 1999 and has received subsequent performances in Minneapolis and New York.

John Metcalf has always been interested in an active participatory role for the composer in society and in the past few years he has undertaken many creative music projects in schools throughout Wales. His is also Artistic Director of the Swansea Festival. In 1995 he received the John Edwards Memorial Award given by the Guild for the Promotion of Welsh Music for his services to music in Wales.

John Metcalf’s compositions are frequently performed and broadcast in many countries. In 1999 alone his work was performed in Australian, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Sweden, and the USA. His music is recorded on the Lorelt label.

www.johnmetcalf.com