Biography — Gareth Moorcraft

Full biography:

Gareth Moorcraft (b. 1990) is a British composer and arranger based in London and South Wales. His music has been performed and broadcast internationally by leading ensembles including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and soloists and chamber ensembles including Tabea Debus, Tom Poster, Endymion, Chroma, and the Solem Quartet.

Gareth’s concert works are regularly commissioned and performed in the UK and Europe, and his music has been released on NMC Recordings and Delphian Records. Projects have spanned collaborations with dance companies (The National Dance Company of Wales, and The New Dance Collective, Hamburg), site-specific installations (Swansea International Festival; Artes Mundi 6), and live film projects with Chroma and Sinfonia Cymru.

Gareth’s recent music often engages with ‘creative transcription’, recycling and distorting historical materials and musical tropes and presenting them in unusual new contexts. This is clearest in works such as Alternative views from History (2022), a series of transcriptions and “recompositions” which combines recorder, viol and lute with an ensemble of ‘modern’ instruments. Vida for solo piano (2021), Diaries of the Early Worm for solo recorder (2020), and Reflections (After Orlando Gibbons) (2017) similarly take early music as points of inspiration. Other key interests in Gareth’s music include his exploration of musical “story-telling”, and the pairing of highly “mechanical” repetitive ideas with much freer, improvisation-based material. Most recently, in Unrealities and Two Minds (2023), two substantial new works for pianist Joseph Havlat, Gareth is exploring the possibilities of pairing synthesisers and electronic sounds with acoustic instruments.

Gareth was awarded an Ivor Novello Award in the solo/duo category of The Ivors Composer Awards 2020. He is also the recipient of the prestigious RPS Composition Prize (2016), the Ty Cerdd Composition Prize (2012), and the inaugural BASCA British Composer Awards Student Prize (2012). As a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Gareth was awarded the Theodore Holland Intercollegiate Composition Prize - a biennial competition open to outstanding composition students from the RNCM, RCM, RAM and RCS. He was a Britten Pears Young Artist, attending the Britten-Pears Advanced Composition Courses run by Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews (2016) and John Woolrich (2014).

Gareth studied composition with Robert Saxton (Worcester College, Oxford), and subsequently with Gary Carpenter and David Sawer (Royal Academy of Music, London). He also had additional tuition with Oliver Knussen. Gareth completed his PhD in Composition in 2019, and he is currently a composition professor at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Gareth’s studies were generously supported by the RVW Trust, the Countess of Munster Trust, and the Arts Council of Wales.

In 2019, Gareth established the RAM’s Composer Club, which provides workshop opportunities for young composers studying in London state schools. He is passionate about music education and has run music workshops with numerous music organisations and festivals in the UK.

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Short biography:

Gareth Moorcraft (b.1990) is a British composer based in London and South Wales, UK.

His recent music often engages with ‘creative transcription’, recycling and distorting historical materials and musical tropes and presenting them in unusual new contexts. In 2023, he has also created a series of new works exploring the combination of synthesisers with acoustic instruments, in collaboration with pianist Joseph Havlat.

Gareth’s music has been performed and broadcast internationally by leading ensembles including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and soloists and chamber ensembles including Tabea Debus, Tom Poster, Endymion, Chroma, and the Solem Quartet.

Gareth is a composition professor and lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, London. In 2019, he established the RAM’s Young Composer Club, which provides workshop opportunities for young composers studying in London state schools. He is passionate about music education and has run music workshops with numerous music organisations and festivals in the UK.

View Gareth's C.V.

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