Dr Oliver Thurley

Profile

I write music that is quiet and disquieting.

My music has recently been performed by Plus-Minus ensemble, Ensemble Nikel, Heather Roche, Seth Parker Woods, Dario Calderone and Klaus Lang. I have been commissioned by the impuls academy and Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Tzlil Meudcan festival and the iN festival in Seoul. In addition to performances across Europe, my music has recently been performed in North and South America, Asia, and New Zealand.

In 2015, I  was a winner of Heather Roche’s crowd-funded commissioning competition. In the same year, I produced a short film with Austrian composer and organist Klaus Lang and violist Barbara Konrad, carrying a harmonium over Ilkley Moor. In early 2017, the piece ‘whose veil remains inscrutable’ was released as part of Ensemble Nikel’s retrospective box-set A Decade. I have recently published journal articles exploring fragility in the work of Jakob Ullmann. I received the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis for composition at the Darmstadt Summer Courses 2018, the jury noting that in my work “compositional restraint becomes radical”.

I hold a PhD in music composition and is currently a teaching fellow at the University of Leeds, UK.

Responsibilities

• Programme Leader for Graduate Diploma

Research interests

I compose contemporary instrumental music, focusing on aspects of quietness and fragility to invoke a sense of disquiet. As a composer, my work focuses on aspects of quietness, fragility, temporal disorientation, timbral instability and computational/algorithmic procedure. Other areas of research interests include:

• quiet music;
• fragility;
• new music;
• extended durational music;
• analog, digital, and modular synthesis;
• ambient and drone music;
• creative-coding practices;
• contemporary instrumental technique;
• Science Fiction

Qualifications

• PhD Composition
• MMus Electronic & Computer Music Studies
• BA(Hons) Music Production

Student education

I teach on a wide range of modules throughout the School of Music, primarily focussing on music technology, composition and the Music, Multimedia & Electronics (MME) programme.

This includes various modules relating to Electronic Music Production and Creation; Music Technology; Electronic & Computer Music.

Research groups and institutes

• Making Music