Nick Casswell (above)
Thursday 27 May 2010
From 11:30 to 12:30
NOVARS Research Centre: Studio 1
University of Manchester, England
Imaginary Sound Worlds - Some thoughts on recent acoustic and acousmatic compositional processes and their potential use in a forthcoming music theatre work
Casswell, Nicholas (b. July 25, 1974, Cheltenham). British composer of mostly chamber works that have been performed successfully throughout Europe.
Nicholas Casswell studied at Dartington College of Arts from 1993-96 (BA with Honours), the University of York from 1998-99 (MA), and completed his PhD in Music Composition at the University of Leeds in 2003 (external examiner Christopher Fox, 2004). His studies at the University of Leeds were enabled by an Audrey Pass Charitable Trust Scholarship and an AHRB Scholarship. In 2000 he was on research leave at Seoul National University in South Korea, enabled by a Samsung/Royal British Legion/BKVA Scholarship.
He has been commissioned and performed by a number of leading international ensembles, such as De Ereprijs, the Luxembourg Sinfonietta and the Nieuw Ensemble, and he has been broadcast across Europe and in Hong Kong. He has received a number of awards and prizes for his compositional output, receiving 1st Prize in the Leeds Philosophical Society’s Millennium Composing Competition, selected 'most promising composer' with The Transformation and Other Stories at the 7th International Young Composers Meeting, Holland (hosted by Louis Andriessen), and awarded 2nd prize for his percussion quartet Temporal Trajectories at the 2nd International Jurgenson Competition, Russia. With Triplicity for the Luxembourg Sinfonietta he won both 1st Prize for the 2007 International Composition Prize Luxemburg and was selected most outstanding composer under 35 at the 2007 ISCM World Music Days in Hong Kong, resulting in the ISCM-IAMIC Young Composer Award. His commission from ISCM and IAMIC for the Nieuw Ensemble was performed at the 2009 International Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, and subsequently broadcast on Radio 4 Nederland. Triplicity is issued on CD on the Luxembourg LGNM label.
Composition. His interests also lie in the study of Korean Folk music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and in 2004 he received an ARHB Fellowship to research the Korean genre sanjo, resulting in a co-authored book, Korean Kayagum Sanjo: A Traditional Instrumental Genre published by Ashgate (ISBN: 978-0-7546-6362-1). Here, he integrated a Deleuzian philosophical approach to sanjo, which was reviewed as 'highly commendable' by Cambridge University Press.
Contact
Email: nickcasswell@yahoo.co.uk
