Paul Whitty (born 1970) is an England-based composer born in Northern Ireland.
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Paul Whitty was born in Lisburn, N.Ireland in 1970. He studied with Roger Marsh at York University, Magnus Lindberg and Colin Matthews at the Britten-Pears School, and Vinko Globokar at the Dartington International Summer School, and completed a DPhil in composition with Michael Finnissy at the University of Sussex.
His work has been performed by the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Expose, IXION, Michael Finnissy, [rout], Philip Howard, and Mieko Kanno amongst others, and his music has featured at many festivals including Brighton, Ultima in Oslo, the Gaudeamus Music Week in Amsterdam, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and at State Of The Nation in London. He has received numerous awards, including from the Arts Council of England, AHRC, the Britten-Pears Foundation, and the British Council.
Paul Whitty is a founder, along with the composers Sam Hayden and Paul Newland, of the ensemble [rout], which has made several concert tours in the uk, appearing on BBC Radio 3's contemporary music programme Hear and Now, on a BMIC Cutting Edge concert tour, at the ICA and at the Huddersfield Festival.
He is Reader in Composition; Research Director for Film, Fine Art and Music; and Co-Director of the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University and has been a visiting tutor in collaborative practice at Dartington College of Arts and the Laban Centre, London.
More recently he has become increasingly interested in collaborative cross-disciplinary work methods, often involving site-specific projects and installations. Site-specific projects have taken place in the unlikely environments of the Mecca State Bingo Hall in Kilburn, Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge, the office of Beaconsfield art gallery in Vauxhall, the freezer compartment of a fridge in Romford amongst others.
One of Paul's more recent collaborative works Vauxhall Pleasure (2004) with Anna Best consisted of a site event at Vauxhall Cross, London; an installation at the Museum of Garden History as part of their Tempered Ground exhibition, and two performances at Tate Britain. In November 2008 a concert version of the project took place at the Warehouse, London as part of the BMIC Cutting Edge Series, in the form of a film, an installation and a live performance.