Sinan Carter Savaskan

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Music

Contemporary Art Music: chamber, orchestral, performance-arts related, electronic, experimental, genuinely original music.

Life

Sinan C Savaskan (b. 1954) is a composer of orchestral, chamber and performance-art related contemporary music. He works and lives in London. His music has been commissioned and performed in over twenty countries by some of the foremost performers of contemporary music, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, John Harle and Myrha Saxophone Quartet, the Lontano Ensemble, the SEM Orchestra/Petr Kotik, the Balanescu String Quartet, the Gemini Ensemble, the Smith Quartet, Tim Brady, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Yvar Mikhashoff, MusICA series of the Institute of Contemporary Arts/London, Martin Ball and Cambridge New Music Players. He was the composer of the title track of the London Musicians Collective’s first recording in 1981. He won the 1988 Dio Fund Award for Composition with his quartet for saxophones, The Street — originally commissioned and premiered by John Harle with his Myrha Saxophone Quartet. He is the joint winner of the of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s current Composers’ Forum project commission. The resulting work, his Symphony No. 2 ‘The Age of Analysis’ was premiered by the orchestra under Martyn Brabbins on 12 XII1997 and broadcast the following February on BBC Radio 3. Sinan Savaskan is working on a Contemporary Arts Ensemble/London commission for their debut concert in March 1999. He will be conducting the ensemble at the Institute of Contemporary Arts during a series of spring concerts of new, and essential music from mid-20th Century. He is the musical director of a film in production on the life of the Renaissance composer Gesualdo, directed by Bernardo Bertolluci and produced by Jeremy Thomas. His Symphony no 3 ‘La Rosa Enflorece and the English Cadence’, commissioned by the SEM Orchestra/Petr Kotik had its premiere in New York on 21 June 1998. A BBC Symphony Orchestra commission, The Symphony no 2 ‘The Age of Analysis’ had its first performance on 12 December 1997 conducted by Martyn Brabbins, followed by a broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in February 1998. His ‘Three Dances’ for Orchestra Op 31 (1996) (three dance interludes from the work-in-progress ‘Venom’, an opera) was selected as the featured work for the Manchester Composers’ Forum. It was performed as the final work of the event on 26 October 1997 by the RNCM Orchestra under Malcolm Layfield. A repeat performance took place two days later in the same hall in a concert for general public. The work was received extremely enthusiastically by this audience of clasical music lovers with very little experience of contemporary music. The rest of the programme contained works by Mozart and Schubert. He is the current recipient of the prestigious American Foundation for the Contemporary Perforformance Arts’ Grant - an award of $25000 to enable him to continue with intensive work on his current projects.