Young Composer Competition 2008

Who's Who

The competition is being organised by The Ebor Singers' EDUCATION MANAGER, ALISUN PAWLEY, and the choir's CONDUCTOR, PAUL GAMESON.  If you have any questions before you submit your entry, they are happy to help!

The competition will be held in two parts. The submissions will be short-listed by Alisun and Paul, with help from KERRY ANDREW (more info).  The informal rehearsal and recording sessions will be led by Kerry, who will be joined for competition final by composers PHILIP MOORE, ROGER MARSH and poet and dramatist NIGEL FORDE when the winner(s) and composer-in-residence will be decided.

EDUCATION MANAGER - Alisun Pawley

Originally from Florida, Alisun has spent long enough at university in Newcastle and York to really confuse people with her accent!   She has been singing with The Ebor Singers for the last four years, during which time she has also been researching 'singalongability' to popular music for her PhD at the University of York, and running singing workshops in primary schools across the York region.

CONDUCTOR - Paul Gameson

Paul is the founder of The Ebor Singers, and enjoys a varied career as conductor, singer and teacher.  He studied music of seventeenth-century France for his PhD at the University of York, but his wider musical interests include the English Choral Tradition, jazz, and film music.  His most-prized possession is a copy of the soundtrack of Goldfinger, signed by John Barry himself....

KERRY ANDREW

Kerry Andrew graduated from York University in 2005 with a PhD in Composition, where she studied with Roger Marsh.  She is already established as a composer and singer in London, with particular interest in music education and music theatre. Although Kerry was not brought up in a church music tradition, her style is on the one hand sympathetic to the restraint and context of text and liturgy and on the other imbued with a dynamic freshness and vitality. Kerry won the Temple Church Choir Composition Prize in 2002, and the journal Choir and Organ included her as featured composer in March 2005. Most recently, this year her piece The Song of Doves, written to commemorate the victims of the July 7th bombings, was performed as part of the national memorial service in Regent's Park a year on. Kerry was commissioned by The Ebor Singers in 2006 to write Dusk Songs, and is writing a mass for the choir's 15th anniversary, to be performed in York Minster on 15th August.

Kerry's music is published by Faber Music and OUP.

PHILIP MOORE

Philip Moore has been organist at York Minster since 1983, and retires this July. He studied at the Royal College of Music, and in 1968 he became Assistant Organist at Canterbury Cathedral. In 1974 he succeeded Dr. Barry Rose as Organist and Master of the Choristers at Guildford Cathedral, and in 1983 he moved to York Minster where he became Organist and Master of the Music, in succession to Dr. Francis Jackson. While Philip has written music for each of the choirs he has been associated, he has had commissions from many others. Perhaps best known are his Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Most recently, he wrote The King and the Robin for Westminster Abbey Choir, to a text by Poet Laureate Andrew Motion. The Ebor Singers have commissioned a five-movement work, Pilgrimage, which will be premiered on 16 August in York Minster.

Philip's work is published by Boosey & Hawkes, Faber Music and Oxford University Press. His choral music has been recorded by Westminster Abbey Choir, the Choir of St John's College, Cambridge and the Vasari Singers.


ROGER MARSH

Roger Marsh is Professor of Compostion at York University. He studied composition first in London with Ian Kellam, and later at York University with Bernard Rands. He spent two years in California on a Harkness Fellowship and then lectured in Music at Keele University until 1988 when he returned to York University. In the autumn of 1993 he was visiting composer at Harvard University. On his return to the UK he co-founded a contemporary music ensemble Black Hair which continues to give concerts of new music and music theatre, and is a Yorkshire Arts Ensemble in Residence.

Roger has written music for all genres, for small and large chamber groups, for voices, for theatre and has often employed the use of electronics in many of these works. His most recent works include a setting of all of Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire – 50 Rondels Bergamasques (Peters Edition), which was released in 2007 on NMC records featuring the Hilliard Ensemble and The Ebor Singers (NMC127). He is currently working on an extended work for the Hilliard Ensemble, a setting of passages from Dante's Inferno, to be premiered in Perugia, Italy in September 2008.

Roger's music is published by Peters Edition and Chester Novello.


NIGEL FORDE

Nigel Forde is an actor, poet and dramatist.  He is a co-funder and artistic director of the Riding Lights Theatre Company, based in York.  He was born in 1944 and educated at Grammar School and Oxford University. Originally intending to be a musician, he sang in the Collegium Musicum, played in the University Orchestra, the St. Catherine's String Quartet and took lessons from Jean Pougnet whom he met while playing in the Dolmetsch Ensemble for the Haslemere Festival. Music still plays a large part in his poetry.

He became an actor in the company at York Theatre Royal and soon found himself writing, directing and composing for the theatre. Having written for an performed with several companies he co-founded Riding Lights Theatre Company, now resident at Friargate Theatre, York. He was regularly heard on BBC Radio 4 for ten years; first as resident poet on Midweek, and then as the presenter of Bookshelf. He has been a contributor to scores of other radio and TV programmes, writing features, plays, talks and poems, and reading A Book at Bedtime.

He has read for, and chaired discussions at all the major British Literary Festivals, tutored on courses run by the Arvon Foundation, the Taliesin Centre, and the Performing Arts Lab. and has sat on literary award panels including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Betty Trask and the Gollancz Fantasy Prize. He has worked as a lyricist with Arnold Wesker on a musical of 'The Kitchen' and on a number of screenplays: three for the BBC2/S4C series 'Testament' one of which won an Emmy; monologues for Claire Bloom and Jonathan Pryce; and a short film 'Timoon' which won Special Distinction in a TV Series at the Annecy International Animation Festival.

In York he runs a branch of The Poetry School, lecturing and running seminars, and is a visiting lecturer at St. John's College, Durham, and St John's College York.