Patrick Nunn
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Patrick Nunn studied with Frank Denyer at Dartington College of Arts and with Gary Carpenter at the Welsh College of Music and Drama returning once again to Dartington in 1995 to study with the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen. He is currently studying with Professor Simon Bainbridge on a doctoral course in composition at the Royal Academy of Music supported by a 2007 PRS Foundation Scholarship.
Patrick’s work is often collaborative-based working with a broad spectrum of disciplines including film, theatre, dance, sculpture and performance art. Momenta, his most recent collaborative venture with choreographer Mikaela Polly, was selected as part of Ballet Rambert's 2005 repertoire. His sensual and dramatic score for Genet's silent film Un Chant d'amour commissioned by the Arts Council of Wales toured the UK in 1998 returning to the Barbican as part of the BITE series in 2003 as an adaptation for piano. In 2002, his evocative score for Concentric Circles' production of Racine's Phaedra ran for over a month at Riverside Studio's.
Patrick has been commissioned by performers such as Icebreaker, Piano Circus, The Gogmagogs, The New London Children's Choir, PM Ensemble, Ephyra, Sub Divo and Charlie Barber & Band to name just a few. His work has gained many prestigious awards including the Gregynog Award 94 for Colour Cycle , the Composing for Children prize as part of the BBC's Fairest Isle festival in 1995 for Songs of our Generation and the RCM Rarescale award 2004 for Into My Burning Veins a Poison. More recently, Mercurial Sparks, Volatile Shadows received the British Composers Award 2006 in the Instrumental Solo and Duet category whilst Gaia Sketches was nominated in the New Media category.
Patrick’s latest work investigates the meeting points between sonic worlds such as in Escape Velocity for accordion and string quartet. The work premiered at the Royal Academy of Music, London and featured again at the Queens Hall ‘Diamanten’, Copenhagen in 2007 where it was recorded live for Danish radio. His work Gaia Sketches for solo cello and live electronics takes this concept a stage further by utilising the extraordinary Hyperbow developed by Diana Young at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to form an intuitive and musical connection between the performer and the live electronics. The collaboration was documented in the proceedings for the sixth International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression 2006 (NIME 06) at the Centre Pompidou, IRCAM, Paris. The paper, titled “Composing for Hyperbow: A Collaboration between MIT and the Royal Academy of Music.” was co-authored with Diana Young.
Other works that follow a similar approach with electro-acoustic elements include his work Gonk for solo bassoon and tape (selected as the competition piece for the Florence Woodbridge Bassoon Prize at the Royal Academy of Music) and his clarinet piece Coalescence (recently performed by Mark Simpson, winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year 2006). His children’s miniatures Music of the Spheres for piano and planets incorporate a tape part of vibrations taken by the NASA spacecraft Voyager. Written for Thalia Myers, their success led to the commissioning of a new work for violin and tape and will be published by the ABRSM as part of their spectrum series next year.
