Marco Galvani

I'm Marco, an undergraduate student at The Queen's College Oxford, studying composition with Professor Robert Saxton. I studied for three years with Emily Howard at the Junior Royal Northern College of Music, and subsequently with Larry Goves and Anna Meredith in the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain. My main compositional influences are Ades, Feldman, Part, Tavener, and Lachenmann. I am particularly interested in experimenting with subtle instrumental and vocal timbres and putting them in different contexts for the listener. I have worked with a variety of ensembles through the JRNCM, including the New Music Ensemble, which performed my pieces Alchemy and Evocation in 2011 and 2012 respectively. Through the JRNCM I composed a piece for the Manchester Camerata in January 2013. My piece Evocation was work-shopped by members of the orchestra in the RNCM concert hall under Philip Cashian. I was a composer for the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain from 2012/13. My pieces An Eccentric Orbit, Onix and Glass Cathedrals were performed by various instrumentalists throughout the year. An Eccentric Orbit was composed on the NYO winter course in response to Holst's Planets Suite. In Easter, we wrote pieces for large open ensemble. I composed Onix in response to this, which was performed in the foyer of The Sage, Gateshead, as well as in the Royal Festival Hall in London. On the residency in Derry, I based my piece on the mystical work of Mark Rothko. This piece was performed by a string ensemble of players from the NYO in the Waterfront Hall, Belfast, as well as in Derry. Glass Cathedrals was performed in the Tate Modern in August 2013. Since starting my studies at the Queen's College, Oxford, I have composed pieces for my closest friends through choir and individual settings. My Lamentations of Jeremiah were performed by the Choir of the Queen's College, Oxford alongside the Faure Requiem and Bach. On the 8th May, Voces Reginae of the Queen's Choir performed my extended work Vigilate for two spatially separated SSA choirs and organ. Towards the end of Trinity Term 2014, the choir performed my new work Bring Us, O Lord God in choral evensong. I have been commissioned by Queen's Choir, Sansara Choir, the Choir of Mary Magdalen, Oxford, and the Zeitgeist Chamber Orchestra. Recently I received a commission from Jeremy Summerly and the Edington International Choral Festival 2015, for a setting of the Tantum Ergo, which will be performed at the festival evensong, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.