Andrew
Ford is a composer, writer and broadcaster and has won awards in all
three capacities. Born in Liverpool, England in 1957, Ford was educated
at the University of Lancaster. He came to Australia in 1983.
Ford has composed orchestral and chamber music, operas and music-theatre
pieces, and a wide range of vocal and solo instrumental works. His music
has been featured internationally at such festivals as Adelaide, Aspen,
Ferrara, Houston, Istanbul, Kuhmo, Melbourne, Seoul, Sydney and at Salzburg's
Aspekte. The major Australian orchestras have played his works,
and so have groups such as the Brodsky Quartet, the London Sinfonietta,
the Australia Ensemble, Het Trio, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble
and the New Juilliard Ensemble. His piano pieces have been played by
the likes of Peter Donohoe, Lisa Moore, Gerard Willems and Ananda Sukarlan,
while his vocal music has been sung by Sarah Leonard, Lyndon Terracini,
Merlyn Quaife and, above all, Gerald English, for whose voice Ford composed
more than a dozen pieces.
Ford's music has won several national awards. In 2003, The Waltz
Book, an hour-long sequence of 60 minute-waltzes for solo piano,
written for Ian Munro, was awarded the Jean Bogan Prize. In 2004, Ford's
song cycle, Learning to Howl, won both the AMC Award for Best
Composition by an Australian Composer and the Paul Lowin Song Cycle
Prize. At the 2004 Adelaide Festival, Jane Edwards and the Australian
String Quartet gave the first performance of Tales of the Supernatural
(an Ian Potter Commission).
Andrew Ford was composer-in-residence with the Australian Chamber Orchestra
from 1992 to 1994 and held the Peggy Glanville-Hicks Composer Fellowship
from 1998 to 2000. In 2005 and 2006 he was the recipient of a fellowship
awarded by the Music Board of the Australia Council. During this time
he composed works for the pianists Marcel Worms and Michael Kieran Harvey,
the folk-song cycle Barleycorn for Warren Fahey, Dave de Hugard
and the Southern Cross Soloists, as well as Scenes from Bruegel,
a joint commission for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and the
New Julliard Ensemble, first performed by the latter at New York's Lincoln
Center in April 2006. Other recent works include his second string quartet,
A Reel, a Fling and a Ghostly Galliard for the Grainger Quartet,
the multi-media piece, Elegy in a Country Graveyard, for the
first Kangaroo Valley arts festival, and Headlong for the Sydney
Symphony.
Beyond composing, Ford has been an academic (on the Faculty of Creative
Arts at the University of Wollongong from 1983–1995) and has written
and broadcast on a wide range of music. In 1998 he won the Geraldine
Pascall Prize for critical writing. Ford wrote and presented the radio
series Illegal Harmonies (first heard in 1997), Dots on the
Landscape (2001) and Music and Fashion (2005). He has also
written five books: a collection of interviews, Composer to Composer;
the book of the series Illegal Harmonies; a selection of his
essays and reviews, Undue Noise; Speaking in Tongues: the songs of
Van Morrison (with Martin Buzacott); and most recently In Defence
of Classical Music.
Since February 1995, Andrew Ford has presented The Music Show
each Saturday morning on ABC Radio National.
For further information about Andrew, visit his website: http://www.andrewford.net.au
Belinda Webster, OAM, is the manager and recording producer of Tall
Poppies, the record label which she founded in October 1991 in Sydney.
Tall Poppies specialises in classical and Australian music played exclusively
by Australian artists. More than 150 compact discs and 523 world premiere
recordings have been released since this time. Tall Poppies is unique
in Australia in that it commissions works for recording, currently numbering
50. It has achieved distribution in the United Kingdom, USA, Canada,
Germany, Switzerland, France and on-line.
With an extensive background in radio, initially working at 2MBS, Belinda
Webster commissions new works, records artists, edits, designs and co-ordinates
distribution.
Belinda Webster is particularly proud of the relationships she has
forged with the artists on Tall Poppies, including ASME's first Patron,
Dr Andrew Ford.
For more information, visit the Tall Poppies Website: http://members.iinet.net.au/~tallpoppies
