Andrew Glover, born 1962 in Birmingham, UK, is an English composer. His music has been played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins and Grant Llewellyn and the English Northern Philharmonic under Paul Daniel, and is mainly performed abroad from Mexico to Russia among other places and artists. He is a visiting Composition Lecturer at the Birmingham Conservatoire (BCU).
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Andrew Glover, born 1962 in Birmingham, UK, is an English composer. His music has been played by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins and Grant Llewellyn and the English Northern Philharmonic under Paul Daniel, Mexico State Symphony Orchestra, Carlos Chavez Orchestra etc and is mainly performed abroad from Mexico to Russia among other places and artists. He is a visiting Composition Lecturer at the Birmingham Conservatoire (BCU).
Glover studied in Nottingham and gained his Doctorate in 1994 from Keele University after studying with George Nicholson. His composition is influenced by world music and rock. He has won several competitions.
His most well known work is the aggressive work for orchestra "Fractured Vistas" from 1995. Played and broadcast in various countries and shortlisted in the Lutoslawski Prize in 1997.
In 2000 he began working on his concerto 'The Death of Angels: A Concerto for Violin and Orchestra', based on John Milton's Paradise Lost. This work was premiered and broadcast by the BBC in February 2003.
His 45 minute Piano Concerto took four years to compose between 2002 to 2006 but remains unperformed to date.
After three years research, experimentation with Sound Files and electronic principles and historic research into the Eastern Roman Empire he completed his "Symphony No.2: Byzantium" in 2009 which was released on the CDP label in Britain. Further research and experimentation produced the "Anglo Saxon Trilogy" based on Anglo Saxon culture and language. Both works are for fixed media (CD).
Since the end of 2010 he has been quiet on the composition front in favour of musicological research.
Since 2005 he has been a visiting lecturer in music Composition at the Birmingham Conservatoire, (BCU).
Glover worked as a semi-professional flautist as a student and much of his output features the flute, with several commissioned compositions for the American/Mexican flutist Asako Arai.
Much of Glover's early work dealt with the manipulation of pulse and time. He said in an interview on BBC Radio in 2004 that his fascination in this area came from watching nature’s natural rhythms of life change and move at different rates of change, and “the sound of the great earth cracking…”. This informed the works in his PhD thesis and culminated in works such as Fractured Vistas and The Fickle Virgin of Seventeen Summers.
This research work lead to his study of the polyrhythmic, micro-macro aleotory works of György Ligeti and Witold Lutosławski. His own work is something of a development of these ideas into a more modern idiom, this is particularly evident in the slow movements of his Violin and Flute Concertos.
In 2007 he won the Presidents Prize in Potsdam, Germany for his work Reasons of Darkness, Excuses of Light. It is a work that shows the composers skill in incorporating new and exciting sounds from the world music field. It is written for Turkish Baglama (Saz) and Chamber Ensemble.
His 2009 work for tape Symphony No.2: Byzantium combines and incorporates much Anatolian, Byzantine, Greek and Iranian Classical and world music. The piece is cast in five separate movements and lasts 73 minutes and took nearly three years to write.
In 2009 he came second with his piano piece A Night Walk Through Mexico City in the YAGE competition in Salzburg, Austria and wrote a new Piano Sonata (No.2, The Salzburg) for the pianist in this competition, Baiba Oshina.
In 2010 the fourth movement of his Symphony No.2: Byzantium, entitled Byzantine Light was shortlisted in the Udine Composition Prize in Italy.
Glover is a flute player and multi instrumentalist, also playing Bodhran, Baglama, Bass Guitar, Electric Guitar, Whistles and Woodwind. He has recorded for various artists in session and works with students encouraging performance techniques and styles. As a flautist he has a Performance Diploma (LGSM).He specialises in the fields of contemporary flute and also 19th century romantic music playing a 10 keyed German Flute in authentic performances and a 1903 Hawkes & Son Boehm System wooden flute.
In November 2008, following leaking of a BNP database, Glover was quoted as admitting "involvement" with the BNP British National Party in an interview with the Daily Mirror.[1] He denied "current membership" of the BNP in a later interview.[2]
In March 2009, a petition was launched by left wing organisations, seeking unsuccessfully to have Glover removed from his post as visiting lecturer at Birmingham City University.[3] In the Times Higher Education Supplement interview he accused the left wing of a "1950s McCarthy witch-hunt" against him. He has always claimed the Mirror interview was faked to discredit him.