Tom Armstrong
PhD (York)
Tutor
Tom Armstrong read music at the University of York, staying on to study for a Dphil in composition with Roger Marsh, which he was awarded in 1994. Bursaries and Scholarships have also enabled him to study with Vinko Globokar, at Dartington Summer School, as well as Colin Matthews, Oliver Knussen and Magnus Lindberg at the Britten-Pears School. Tom was a pianist with Icebreaker from 1989 to 1994, touring and recording extensively.
Tom’s music has been performed by many of the UK’s leading soloists and ensembles including Fiona Kimm, Stephen Gutman, Andrew Ball, the Duke Quartet, the Balanescu Quartet, Continuum, the New Music Players, the Composers Ensemble, the RSNO and the BBC Philharmonic. His work has featured in many of the UK’s major contemporary music festivals including Cheltenhan, Oxford and Meltdown. Competition successes have included the final of the 1991 Yorkshire Arts Young Composers Competition and the inaugural Manchester Composers Platform in 1995. The orchestral work Squaring Up and the piano piece Dance Maze have both been broadcast on Radio Three. In the mid-nineties commissions from the Endymion Ensemble, the East of England Orchestra (now Viva) and Continuum produced a series of uncompromising, closely argued works including the 1996 song cycle Aerial Dynamics. By contrast, Morning Sketch, commissioned for the 1999 Isleworth Festival, and Partita, premiered in the Cutting Edge series the same year, embraced a more lyrical, accessible style.
In 1998 Tom began regular collaboration with the Ballet Independent’s Group (BIG) and in 1999 he was a participant on the prestigious International Course for Professional Choreographers and Composers at Bretton Hall where he studied with Nigel Osborne and Robert Cohen. The ‘Millennium Commission’ from the National Youth Ballet resulted in FIBBA, a collaboration with choreographer Susan Crow that premiered at the Lowry in Salford and enjoyed a hugely successful run of performances culminating in a Sadlers Wells gala in November 2000.
Recent works include Tall Ship Tales (2001) commissioned by the City of Rochester Symphony Orchestra, Divertissements (2002) performed by [rout] at Ocean, Spin (2003), a multi-media dance project incorporating Western and Indian techniques and funded by South East Arts, Damascene Portrait (2003) for the Trillium brass quartet, Bounce (2004) commissioned by Making Music as part of their ‘Breakout’ scheme, Four Instances (2005), commissioned by Gemini, Subterrania (2003) premiered by the New Music Players in Bromsgrove’s Mixing Music series and swiftly repeated by Black Hair at the York Late Music Festival and An Opening Line (2005), a prequel to Damascene Portrait, commissioned by Trillium and premiered at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2005 Tom took part in the pilot of M&DE @ Dartington, an interdisciplinary lab for choreographers, composers and visual artists from all over the UK and abroad. He has recently been commissioned to develop a dramatisation of the novel Black Maria by Diana Wynne Jones. This multimedia production fusing music, dance and film will receive its premiere in London in October 2007. He is currently working on a set of miniatures for the guitarist Richard Hand and the flautist Martin Feinstein, to be premiered in Italy in August. Other projects include a music theatre work for Paul Robinson’s Harmonie Band inspired by Beatrice Muller, a permanent resident on the QE2, and a new violin and piano work for Darragh Morgan and Mary Dullea.
E-mail: t.armstrong@surrey.ac.uk
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