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Knut Vaage Contact |
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Voice/violins/objects/computer/composition Alwynne Pritchard was born in Glasgow in 1968 and as a teenager began having composition lessons with her father, Gwyn Pritchard. She went on to study at the Guildhall School of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music in London, where she received many prizes for her work. In 1997 she was awarded a research scholarship by the University of Bristol and in 2003 received a PhD in composition. Alwynne’s music has been described by critics variously as "intriguing", "thought provoking" and “cool and lucid” and has been performed by leading players and ensembles throughout Europe and in America, as well as being recorded for CD and regularly broadcast on BBC Radios 3 and 4 and abroad. In 2002 the BBC Symphony Orchestra gave the first performance of Alwynne's twenty-minute work Critical Mass and she has since completed Map of the Moon, a piano concerto commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, which was premiered with pianist Nicolas Hodges in March 2007. Frame, Alwynne's most recent composition, a music-theatre piece for the Athelas Sinfonietta, film and electronics (developed at IEM, Graz) was commissioned by the European Integra program and premiered at the Sound Around festival, Copenhagen in October 2007. Other recent works include Graffiti for percussion and live electronics, created at the Experimental studio Heinrich Strobel Stiftung in Freiburg; Decoy, created there in 2005 for the Donaueschingen Musiktage was awarded the special prize given by the Foundation Ton Bruynèl, STEIM and the Foundation GAUDEAMUS. Current composition projects include Don't touch me, you don't know where I've been, a 30 minute music-theatre work commissioned by BEK, Bergen, for her own voice, flautist Bjørnar Habbestad, asimisimasa ensemble and live electronics, and a work for electric guitar and two computers for Luc Houtkamp's POW ensemble. During the mid 1990s Alwynne studied voice with Linda Hirst and later performed as guest vocalist with Apartment House in works by Gerhard Stäbler and Cornelius Cardew, as well as performing with them in the Cutting Edge tour of her own work Impossibility and giving the premiere of her Geometry of Pain I at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammer musik in 2002. This performance was later released as part of a festival documentation disc on the WDR label and she recorded her own work Kit for voice and electric guitar as part of Invisible Cities, a disc of her music released on the Metier label. In October 2005 Alwynne released Subterfuge In Vitro, an album of British Indian music, created in collaboration with the London-based Tabla player and producer Kuljit Bhamra. This disc is available on the keda label and distributed throughout Europe by RSK/BMG. In 2006 Alwynne formed the improvisation trio Myrtle with Thorolf Thuestad and London-based Flautist Rowland Sutherland and earlier this year her duo Ding Dong with Berlin-based performer Guido Henneböhl came into being. |
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