James Clarke

James Clarke

James Clarke is a British composer associated with the New Complexity school. He writes for a wide range of forces, including symphony orchestra, ensembles, voices and solo performers, and his output includes more than ninety works.

Works and commissions

His pieces include String Quartet, written for the Arditti Quartet and commissioned jointly by the Huddersfield Festival and Ars Musica in Brussels; Final Dance, written for Klangforum Wien and commissioned by Southwest German Radio for the Donaueschinger Musiktage; Landschaft mit Glockenturm II, scored for seventeen European and Chinese instruments and commissioned by the Viennese organisation Asian Culture Link; and Voices, a large-scale work for nine actors, solo musicians and orchestra with a text specially written by Harold Pinter. Voices is commissioned by the BBC and first broadcast in 2005.

Further commissions come from the French Ministry of Culture, the Beethovenfest Bonn, the Gaudeamus Foundation, the Dresdner Zentrum für zeitgenössische Musik, Musik i Skåne and the University of Cambridge.

Performances and recognition

Portrait concerts have been given by MusikFabrik NRW, Apartment House, Ensemble SurPlus and the Prometheus Ensemble. Clarke is a featured composer at the 2004 Ars Musica festival in Brussels, where ten works are performed in the largest survey of his music to date. He is also featured composer at the Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari, Finland, in 2000.

Teaching and visiting posts

Clarke serves as a visiting professor at universities in several countries. These include Azerbaijan, where he is appointed honorary Professor of Music at the Baku Music Academy; Russia, at the Moscow Conservatoire; and Sweden, at the University of Malmö. He also leads composition courses at the Time of Music Festival in Viitasaari and at the Festival junger Künstler Bayreuth.