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Jonathan Cole |
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| ROSS EDWARDS Biography Works |
| Australian composer Ross Edwards has created a unique sound world which seeks to reconnect music with elemental forces and restore such qualities as ritual, spontaneity and the impulse to dance. His early teachers included Peter Sculthorpe, Richard Meale, and Sandor Veress, and he also studied with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies in Australia and in London. Intensely aware of his vocation as a composer, he has largely followed his own path, allowing the music to speak for itself. He gratefully acknowledges the award of two Keating Fellowships in the 1990s as having been crucial in his development.
Edwards considers it his respons Ross Edwards’s compositions, which are performed worldwide, include symphonies, concertos, chamber and vocal music, children’s music, film scores and music for dance. Works designed for the concert hall sometimes require special lighting, movement, costume and visual accompaniment. Recent works include the highly acclaimed oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming, commissioned for the Sydney Symphony, whose U.S. premiere in February 2005 by Diana Doherty, Lorin Maazel, and the New York Philharmonic has been followed by performances around the world; and The Heart of Night, premiered in April 2005 by the shakuhachi master Riley Lee, Hiroyuki Iwaki, and the Melbourne Symphony. His 5th Symphony, The Promised Land, with a text by David Malouf, was given its world premiere in October 2006 by the Sydney Symphony, David Porceljn and the Sydney Children’s Choir; and as Musica Viva Australia’s Featured Composer for 2007 a new string quartet, Sparks and Auras, will be premiered in November by the Brentano String Quartet. He has recently completed a Clarinet Concerto for soloist David Thomas, who will premiere it in November with Oleg Caetani and the Melbourne Symphony; and Tucson Mantras, for the 2008 Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival in Arizona, where he will be a featured composer. He is currently working on a score for the Australian ballet and choreographer Nicolo Fonte. Ross Edwards is based in Sydney where he lives with his wife Helen, spending as much time as possible working in his studio in the Blue Mountains. His music is mainly published by Ricordi London, and represented in North America by Boosey & Hawkes, New York. For more information and a complete catalogue of works and recordings, see his website www.rossedwards.com. RETURN
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ibility to make the most effective use of one of the planet’s most potent forces to communicate vividly and widely at the highest possible artistic level. His music, whose global significance has been acknowledged, is at the same time deeply connected to its roots in Australia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws many of its shapes and patterns?notably birdsong and the mysterious drones of summer insects. Edwards’s belief in the healing power of music is reflected in a body of contemplative works inspired by the Australian landscape.