People
Chris Garrard, St. Hilda's College
Chris Garrard is a composer studying for a doctorate under the supervision of Dr. Martyn Harry, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He gained an MA in Composition from the University of Durham where he also studied with Dr. Matthew Shlomowitz and electroacoustic music with Dr. Trevor Wishart. His music often explores the concept of negative space from the visual arts and also experiments with timbre and notational methods. His piece Larch & Decay, composed as a response to Marcus Lee's Frame House, won the Diana Burrell Prize in the LCO New: Explore competition in 2010 and was subsequently performed at St. John's, Smith Square.
As a musicologist, Chris has interests in the aesthetics of contemporary music and the visual arts and has studied with Professor Max Paddison. Chris has given papers on music, minimalism and the concept of negative space, and also on indeterminacy in the music of John Cage, Pierre Boulez and Witold Lutosławski. He is currently undertaking research into the music of Valentyn Silvestrov and Helmut Lachenmann in relation to the work of the painter/photographer, Gerhard Richter, with reference to the concepts of memory and aura.
Chris founded and co-directs the new music/improvisation ensemble Syzygy with Chris Ferebee who have performed at Modern Art Oxford and the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (JdP). He is a member of the M@SH Centre for Experimental Music at the JdP where he curated and co-directed the M@SH Marathon, an eight-hour performance of new music and art.
Selected Performances
Larch
and Decay
Performed at St. John's, Smith Square
Members of the London Chamber Orchestra
May 2010
Striations (installation piece)
Performed at the
Sage, Gateshead and Middlesbrough
Institute of Modern Art
Palimpsest Ensemble
Summer 2009