Musicatlas
News for Simaku
- British Composers' Award for Thomas Simaku
[posted 7 December 2009]The British Composers' Award for this year in the category of Instrumental Solo or Duo is awarded Thomas Simaku. He won the prize for his piece “Soliloquy V Flauto Acerbo”, which is for for alto and tenor recorders.
The judges "unanimously agreed that the winning work redefines the instrument in a visionary and entirely original way. They praised it for its virtuosity, depth of expression, and powerful imagination."
Simaku writes about his composition:
'As the first part of the title suggests, the piece belongs to a series of works for solo instruments. After the première of Soliloquy I at the 2000 ISCM Festival, the idea of composing a cycle of solo pieces — the aim was to create different characters within the same protagonist who 'narrates' in different languages, as it were — materialized itself. So far, this is the fifth work in the series (the first three are for string instruments, and the fourth is for Bass Clarinet).
With each piece, the soloistic idea operates on a different instrumental canvas and is elaborated according to the expressive qualities and the technical potentiality of each instrument. In this work, the linear contours based on 'white modality' but constantly 'surrounded' by chromatic and microtonal inflections, as well as the contrapuntal dynamism and the variety of textural formats stemming from it, are at the heart of the musical discourse. The idiosyncratic quality of this work is to be found perhaps in the second part of the title, Flauto Acerbo!'
[Source: uymp.co.uk]
Music
Simaku’s music has been reaching audiences all over Europe and the USA for over a decade, and it has been awarded a host of accolades for its highly expressive qualities and its unique blend of drama, intensity and modernism.
Life
Albanian-born British composer Thomas Simaku (b. 1958) graduated from the Tirana Conservatoire and continued his postgraduate studies at the University of York (1991–96) where he was awarded a PhD in Composition, studying with David Blake. Winner of the coveted Lionel Robbins Memorial Scholarship in 1993 (Simaku was the only candidate in the UK to win the award that year), he also was the 1996 Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at Tanglewood Music Centre in the USA studying with Bernard Rands, and a fellow at the Composers’ Workshop, California State University (1998), with Brian Ferneyhough. In 2000 he was awarded a prestigious Fellowship from the Arts & Humanities Research Council in London.