Biography
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Born
15 October 1957 (age 66)
James Clarke is a British composer associated with the New Complexity school. His compositions number over ninety works for forces such as symphony orchestra, ensembles, voices or solo musicians. They include the String Quartet, written for the Arditti Quartet, commissioned jointly by the Huddersfield Festival and Ars Musica, Brussels; Final Dance, written for Klangforum Wien, commissioned by Southwest German Radio for the Donaueschinger Musiktage; Landschaft mit Glockenturm II, for seventeen European and Chinese instruments, commissioned by the Viennese organisation ‘Asian Culture Link’; Voices, a large-scale work for nine actors, solo musicians and orchestra, with a text specially written by Harold Pinter, commissioned by the BBC and first broadcast in 2005. Further prestigious commissions have come from, among others, the French Ministry of Culture, the Beethovenfest Bonn, the Gaudeamus Foundation, the Dresdner Zentrum für zeitgenössische Musik, Musik i Skåne and the University of Cambridge. Portrait concerts have been given by MusikFabrik NRW, Apartment House, Ensemble SurPlus and the Prometheus Ensemble.
James Clarke has been a visiting professor at universities in various countries, including Azerbaijan, where he was appointed an honorary Professor of Music at the Baku Music Academy; Russia, at the Moscow Conservatoire, and Sweden, at the University of Malmö. He has led composition courses at the Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari, Finland, where he was featured composer in 2000, and at the Festival junger Künstler Bayreuth. He was a featured composer at the 2004 Ars Musica festival in Brussels, where ten works were performed in the largest survey of Clarke’s music to date.
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