Joseph Duddell

Joe Duddell was born in 1972 and studied music at Salford University and then with Steve Martland at the Royal Academy of Music, where he became Composition Fellow. He was appointed Lecturer in Composition at the School of Music and Drama at Exeter University in 2001.

His works have been performed at major festivals and venues and he has received several commissions from the BBC, including Parallel Lines, for the percussionist Colin Currie, Realside, for the BBC for the BBC Singers' 75th Anniversary, and Vaporize (for Paul Lewis and Steve Osborne's Proms chamber music recital in 2000. Duddell featured again in the 2002 Proms in the King's Singers' Orianna project. Snowblind, a concertante work for Colin Currie and the BT Scottish Ensemble, was toured in Scotland and taken to Europe in 2002. Not Waving but Drowning, Duddell's first major orchestral work, commissioned by the BBC and written for Catherine Bott and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, was premièred at the 2002 Huddersfield Festival and was nominated for the BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award in the first British Composer Awards in December 2003. His cello concerto, Shadowplay, commissioned by ViVA! for their 21st birthday season, received its first performance by Thomas Carroll and ViVA! under Nicholas Kok, in April at the Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. Shadowplay was repeated at the 2003 Lichfield Festival, where Duddell was composer-in-residence.

Duddell's most recent large scale composition was a percussion concerto for the 2003 Proms: written for Colin Currie and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and their music director Marin Alsop, Ruby received its world première on 25 July 2003 and was subsequently performed in the 2004 BBC Young Musician of the Year final.

Commissions and Performances
Isolation - 2006
1 May 2006: Civic Hall, Stratford-upon-Avon (world premiere)
2 May 2006: Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham

Isolation
The title refers to the segregation of musical material within movements and between movements. Having been exposed to much more of Webern's music over the last two years I became interested in the perception of disjointed gestures. Webern's brand of serialism I left well alone, but the brevity of much of his music certainly appealed. Having previously written much through-composed music, the idea of seemingly unconnected material constituted a departure. Perhaps the montage form found in Stravinsky's Symphony of Wind Instruments and Tippett's Concerto for Orchestra are more obvious influences as I feel much closer to their aesthetic than Webern's. The title is also borrowed from Joy Division's Closer, a recurring theme of mine, and which 25 years after the death of their singer Ian Curtis, at least when the piece was started, has perhaps slightly more resonance than ever.
Joe Duddell