Giles Swayne




Giles Swayne was born in Hertfordshire in June 1946.  After an early childhood in Singapore and Australia, he grew up in Liverpool and Yorkshire.  He began composing at the age of ten, and in his teens was encouraged by his cousin, the composer Elizabeth Maconchy.  He studied the piano with Gordon Green, Phyllis Hepburn, James Gibb and Vlado Perlemuter.  On leaving Cambridge in 1968 he won a composition scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, London, where he studied with Harrison Birtwistle, Alan Bush and Nicholas Maw.  In 1976-77 he visited the Paris Conservatoire to study with Olivier Messiaen.  In 1980 his huge piece CRY for twenty-eight amplified voices (which is dedicated to Messiaen) was premièred by the BBC Singers under John Poole.  Widely hailed as an important landmark, it has been performed four times in Britain (twice at the London Proms, in 1983 and 1994), and many times in Europe and America.  In 1981 Swayne made a field trip to Senegal to record the music of the Jola community of Casamance (southern Senegal); these recordings are now in the British Library’s Sound Archive and available online.  His interest in Africa and African music has influenced his work both directly and indirectly.  Between 1990 and 1996 he lived in the eastern region of Ghana, where he built a beautiful house in the Akuapem Hills. He now lives in London with his wife, violinist Malu Lin, teaches composition at Cambridge University, and is Composer-in-residence at Clare College, Cambridge.

www.gilesswayne.com


Composers

Fergus Hall
Shruthi Rajasekar
Abel Selaocoe
Nwando Ebizie
Elaine Mitchener
Shiva Feshareki
Sylvia Lim
Laura Moody
Philip Venables
Ayanna Witter-Johnson
Raymond Yiu
Eleanor Alberga
Jacob Fitzgerald
Anna Disley-Simpson
Ruari Paterson-Achenbach
Tom Coult
Matthew Grouse
Errollyn Wallen
Oliver Leith
Benjamin Graves
Robin Haigh
Kevin Leomo
Joseph Davies
Элина Вагина
Svetlana Lavrova
Elena Igotti
Mira Calix
Alex Mills
Darren Bloom
Dominic Wills
Alexia Sloane
Anna Appleby
Jia Chai
Andrew Thomas
Emily Hall
Joel Rust
Timothy Salter
Eloise Gynn
Deborah Pritchard
Andy Ingamells
William Marsey
Elis Czerniak
Soosan Lolavar
Kate Whitley
Stevie Wishart
Ewan Campbell
Jethro Cooke
Edwin Hillier
James Joslin
Timothy Cape
Edward Henderson
Stephen Williams
Gareth Wood
Sasha Millwood
Graham Ross
Jeremy Thurlow
James Brady
Kate Honey
Aleksandr Brusentsev
Kim Ashton
Misha Mullov-Abbado
Freya Waley-Cohen
Josephine Stephenson
Ed Scolding
Giles Swayne
Lloyd Coleman
Jonathan Woolgar
William Cole