Biography 1

John Woolrich has founded a group (the Composers Ensemble), a festival (Hoxton New Music Days), and has been composer in association with the Orchestra of St John’s and the Britten Sinfonia. His collaborations with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group led to his appointment in 2002 as Artist-in-Association. He was guest Artistic Director of the Aldeburgh Festival in 2004 and Associate Artistic Director of the festival from 2005 to 2010. From 2010 to 2013 Woolrich was both Artistic Director of Dartington International Summer School and Professor of Music at Brunel University. From 2013 to 2016 he was Artistic Director of Mirepoix Musique in France. Most recently he has been an Associate Artist of the Gulbenkian Arts Centre, Kent University.

A number of preoccupations thread through his music: the art of creative transcription - Ulysses Awakes, for instance, is a re-composition of a Monteverdi aria, and The Theatre Represents a Garden: Night is based on fragments of Mozart - and a fascination with machinery and mechanical processes, heard in many pieces including The Ghost in the Machine and The Barber’s Timepiece.

Throughout the 1990s, Woolrich had a string of orchestral commissions, which resulted in some of his most significant works: his concertos for viola, oboe, and cello. A CD of the viola and oboe concertos on the NMC label attracted particular attention and was ‘Record of the Week’ on BBC Radio 3. Other orchestral pieces written during this period include The Ghost in the Machine, premiered in Japan by Andrew Davis and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and Si Va Facendo Notte which the Barbican Centre commissioned to celebrate the Mozart European Journey Project.

Recent pieces include Between the Hammer and the Anvil, for the London Sinfonietta, a violin concerto for Carolin Widmann and the Northern Sinfonia, Falling Down, a contrabassoon concerto for Margaret Cookhorn and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and To the Silver Bow for Leon Bosch and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Most recently John Woolrich has composed A Book of Inventions, a large scale set of string quartets.

Biography 2

Before studying composition, John Woolrich studied English at university. That's important. Not because it means Woolrich is a composer who reads books and knows about things other than music, which he does, but because it suggests he began as something of a musical outsider.

The idea of Woolrich as an outsider now seems unimaginable. There are few more widely admired and liked figures in the world of 'new music'. His contacts are oceanic. He has founded ensembles - the Composers Ensemble - and commissioned new works for them assiduously; he is a generous and respected educator; he organises distinguished and original concert series- the Hoxton New Music days, now Almeida Opera Concerts. But as an artist, he maintains the outsider's distance, cultivates a critical mind, and always looks for new perspectives.

What kind of music does he write? Surprisingly perhaps, for someone with his love of the modernist tradition, it is not hard. There are acerbities and abrasions - flatulent trombones, sawn-off oxygen cylinders, flutes that aggress as readily as seduce - but the attitude is benevolent. We find our way around. Musical sections and paragraphs are punctuated for our benefit. Other composers may not hold themselves responsible for the 'concentration problems' of their audiences but Woolrich does.

There's a wonderful moment in the Viola Concerto where the music makes reference, as Woolrich notes, proudly perhaps, 'to the ghost of Schumann's allusion to Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte' from Schumann's Fantasy Op.17. It's about as refined a chain of reference as you can imagine, and just the right side of a joke. Woolrich's music is always intensely cultured. A work needn't descend, he says- and his never does- 'to soap opera to gain access to universal emotions'. From Monteverdi to Mozart, Corelli to Tippett, Berio and Birtwistle, the Great Tradition imposes itself.

Is he then a post-modernist, playing games with his allusions and re-creations? Ulysses Awakes, a wonderfully elegiac string piece from the late 1980s based on the music of Monteverdi, was copper-bottomed neo-classical re-creation, and a continuing success. The Viola Concerto, with its references to Wagner, Schumann and Mozart and its stories of love and parting, was sublimely traditional - and original - myth-making. Another anniversary tribute - Arcangelo, to commemorate Arcangelo Corelli, shows Woolrich removing himself further still from the post-modern aesthetic, revelling not in Corelli's glorious sonorous surface but his structural depths. It was the shape of the concerto grosso- 'a shaggy-dog story without the Beethoven punch-line' - that interested Woolrich, not its effects.

If Woolrich's musical personality is shy, maybe we should look for its essence in the fleeting statements of the Pianobooks, or the intense and private chamber works. But in the end those pictures tell only half the story. The full picture - of an artist grappling with private imperatives and public responsibilities - was provided by the Oboe Concerto, premiered at the Proms in 1996. The questions raised by that piece - how to be convincingly personal in public, how to find and project a voice- are at the heart of Woolrich's music, and they are ones to which Woolrich finds answers as cogent as any composer working today.

| c.Dermot Clinch |

Opinions

"Like all the most interesting composers, John Woolrich's work is a kaleidoscopic mixture: of spiky wit, lightness, dark menace, on canvasses that are hugely ambitious or delicately miniature. Like one of his anecdotes, I would never predict how a Woolrich piece will unfold; he's the master of surprise and variation.

I've premiered some of the pieces from his Pianobooks, a wonderful collection of dramatic vignettes all with beguiling titles (Five Gestures of Parting, The Gastrolaters' Final Sacrifice), some no more than 20 bars in length, often sparse in notes but deep in atmosphere, undeniably modern but with the ghosts of the past tiptoeing through them."

| Joanna MacGregor |

“His music whispers, whirrs, rustles, creaks, and shines with a gentle light, often elegiacal. It is not music of long line, full-throated song, bright hard clarity, physical exuberance. Its characteristic movement is shy, blinking in the sun, attuned better to half lights.” 

| Robin Holloway |

“In the big fight, machines and humans might be considered to occupy opposite corners. Look closer: machines are made by humans, and our designs reveal our desires. A Woolrich timepiece, machine fleur or gismo whirrs and clicks with personality: the composer's, abundantly, but also that of an unnerving simulacrum of the listener, whether willed or not.

Apparently transparent, impassive, these mechanisms surreptitiously put us in mind of ourselves; they evoke the machine within us all, as well as the ghost, the phantom human, which inhabits their quartz-and crystal actions. An Affair of the Heart might make a music of spasming tissue, of the pulse and swish of vital fluids, without moving us any less mysteriously than it would as a smoothed song of lovesickness or loss.

A machine, as everyone knows, can 'have a life of its own'. Machines, like humans, can be capricious; like humans, they can destroy. However seductive their neutrality, however tempting their offer of urgeless order, to trust them may prove lethal. When that little box, that delicate organ, stops ticking….”

| Thomas Ades |

Capriccio

for John Woolrich

As I lug the shorter OED
from the floor to my desk
in one fell swoop (reversed)
of my tendon-pulled left arm,

I think of those who make
of their lives a capriccio -
'a work of lively fancy’
more or less free in form…

a trick, a prank. ' Plucked from the air
(though it’s not that they don’t care
for seriousness, for solid rhyme)
life to them is a merveille,

to be exhausted and renewed
and slipped from its sheath
each day, or at night pursued.
Ssssh. Don’t wake them

as you solemnly rise for work.
The silence echoes with their high joy:
the secret they’ve understood is that
life lapses. There’s no long term.

| Adam Thorpe |