Gareth is an award-winning composer and researcher, with a particular interest in ‘recomposition’ of historical repertoire and multidisciplinary collaborations.
Gareth’s music has been performed and broadcast internationally by leading ensembles including the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and soloists and chamber ensembles including Tabea Debus, Tom Poster, Endymion, Chroma Ensemble, and the Solem Quartet. His work has received an Ivor Novello Award (2020) and the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize (2016).
Alongside Gareth’s diverse collection of concert works, projects have spanned collaborations with dance companies (The National Dance Company of Wales, and The New Dance Collective, Hamburg), site-specific installations (Swansea International Festival; Artes Mundi 6), and live film projects with Chroma Ensemble and Sinfonia Cymru. Gareth has also undertaken residencies with numerous festivals and ensembles, notably a site-specific chorale work for the Dartington Festival, a new spatial work for the Britten Studio at Snape Maltings (created as composer-in-residence for the Britten-Pears Advanced Brass Course), and a musical response to artworks in the Centre Dürrenmatt, Neuchâtel, part of a European tour for Gareth’s song cycle I am your reflection.
Gareth’s recent music often engages with ‘creative transcription’, recycling and distorting historical materials and musical tropes and presenting them in unfamiliar new contexts. For example, Alternative views from History (2021), a series of transcriptions and “recompositions” combining period instruments recorder, viol and lute with an ensemble of ‘modern’ instruments. Vida for solo piano (2021), Diaries of the Early Worm for solo recorder (2020) and Reflections (After Orlando Gibbons) (2017) similarly take ‘early music’ as points of inspiration. Other key interests in Gareth’s music include his exploration of musical storytelling, and the pairing of highly mechanical, repetitive ideas with freer, improvisation-based material. He also explores topics of narrativity in music such as how contemporary composers navigate issues of tension and the experience of time in music, and how compositional processes can be adapted for multidisciplinary collaborative work for dance, film and other contexts.
Gareth was awarded an Ivor Novello Award in the Ivors Composer Awards 2020. He is also the recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize (2016), the Ty Cerdd Composition Prize (2012), and the BASCA British Composer Awards Student Prize (2012). Whilst studying at the Academy, Gareth was awarded the Theodore Holland Intercollegiate Composition Prize - a biennial competition open to outstanding composition students. He was also a Britten-Pears Young Artist, attending the Britten-Pears Advanced Composition Courses run by Oliver Knussen and Colin Matthews (2016) and John Woolrich (2014).
Gareth studied composition with Robert Saxton (Worcester College, Oxford), and subsequently with Gary Carpenter and David Sawer (Royal Academy of Music, London). He has had additional tuition with Oliver Knussen.
At the Academy, Gareth leads modules in Orchestration, Techniques of Composition, and Musical Analysis and Aesthetics.
Selected Publications
TWO MINDS For piano/synthesiser and ensemble. Composed for pianist Joseph Havlat and the Riot Ensemble. (2023)
UNREALITIES For solo piano/synthesiser. Composed for pianist Joseph Havlat. (2023)
ALTERNATIVE VIEWS FROM HISTORY A series of ‘recompositions’ for recorder (solo), viola da gamba, lute, and ensemble. (2021)
VIDA For solo piano. (2021)
REFLECTIONS (AFTER ORLANDO GIBBONS) For large ensemble. (2017)
PhD (Royal Academy of Music): ‘Historical Materials as Subject; musical “borrowing” and stylistic interaction as bases for composing new music.’ (2019)
For a full list of works, please visit: garethmoorcraft.com/works