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7.30 pm Music by Hugh Shrapnel
Conway Hall £8 (£5 concessions) admits to whole festival

You are earnestly requested to bring food and drink to share

The English composer Hugh Shrapnel was born in Birmingham, England in 1947.

In the late 1960s Shrapnel studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music London with Norman Demuth and Cornelius Cardew and had some private lessons with Elizabeth Lutyens. At the RAM he became friendly with fellow composition students including Eddie McGuire, Brian Ferneyhough and Chris Hobbs. Up to 1968 Shrapnel composed in the Schoenbergian 12 tone tradition, but influenced by Boulez and Stockhausen. Soon afterwards, under Cardew¹s influence, Shrapnel moved away from serialism to embrace the experimental tradition of Cage, Feldman, Woolf, Riley, La Monte Young and Cardew himself.. Riley and La Monte Young in particular, as well as Cardew, were powerful influences on Shrapnel¹s music at the time. The late 1960s were a heady ferment of new music in England with Cardew very much the leading figure. Shrapnel took part in numerous concerts and events at this time including the landmark first British performance of Terry Riley's In C with fellow musicians including John White, John Tilbury, Chris Hobbs, Michael Chant, Howard Skempton and Michael Parsons. These activities sowed the seeds for the formation in 1969 of the influential Scratch Orchestra, founded and led by Cornelius Cardew.

During these years Shrapnel wrote many "experimental" pieces from multi-media environmental works to pieces using a very restricted number of pitches, including a whole series of "white note" pieces all composed in 1970. Also in 1970 he was the co-founder of the "Promenade Theatre Orchestra", with fellow composers/performers John White, Chris Hobbs and Alec Hill, developing a peculiarly English brand of minimalism with its unusual line-up of toy pianos, reed organs, wind instruments and percussion.

In the early 1970s Shrapnel, along with many other composers of the time, notably Cardew himself began to move away from the experimental tradition and take up music in support of socialism and working people¹s struggles for a better society. During this time he began to take a strong interest in folk and popular music traditions from England, Ireland and many other countries; this has made a lasting impression. In 1974 Shrapnel, along with Cardew, Laurie Baker, John Marcangelo, Keith Rowe & Vicky Silva, performed in People's Liberation Music a rock/folk band specialising in songs of struggle from all over the world. At this time Shrapnel composed various songs and instrumental pieces based on anti-war and anti-fascist themes. Throughout the 1970s Shrapnel taught music in secondary schools in London and Birmingham.

During the 1980s and 1990s Shrapnel composed various instrumental works Combining melodic material from various popular idioms with the exploratory idiom of the experimental years. In 1991 he was commissioned by the Wise-Taylor Partnership to provide music for the exhibition Unity at the Slaughterhouse gallery in London. Also in 1991 he founded the Redlands Consort with Michael Newman (viola), Simon Allen (percussion) and Francesca Hanley (flute), a group specialising in experimental music together with Renaissance and folk music from around the world. In 1993 the Redlands Consort put on a very successful Cage Memorial concert at the Conway Hall, London.

For the past 10 years Shrapnel has collaborated closely with the composer and pianist Robert Coleridge, putting on many joint concerts of their works and of other composers. Around the same time he formed Amethyst, an electronic keyboard ensemble together with pianist Sarah Walker. In 1994 Shrapnel became Composer in Residence at Musicworks in south London, a music school for children and young people from poor and deprived backgrounds for which he wrote several educational works including and recorder pieces. In 1996 a very successful concert of Shrapnel¹s works was put on at the Blackheath Concert Halls in South East London including the suite for piano duet "South of the River". In 1999 Music Now released a CD of Shrapnel's music "South of the River".

In 2000 Shrapnel took part in a series of educational workshops in Edinburgh organised by the Irish pianist and Suzuki specialist Mary McCarthy. These events included a concert of music by Shrapnel together with pieces by the Scottish composers Ronald Stevenson and Eddie McGuire. Since 2000 Shrapnel has worked closely with the composer and baritone Richard Churches who has performed many of his songs. In September 2002 his early experimental piece "Silence" was performed in the new music festival "Activa Neuer Musik" in Berlin. In 2003 Shrapnel formed the ensemble "Vermilion" with Robert Coleridge, Richard Churches and flautist Claire McKenna that gave its successful inaugural concert at St Cyprians Church in central London in April 2003. Alan Zimmerman performed shrapnel's 1991 work for solo vibraphone "After 4 years" in New York in January 2004.