Sarah Rodgers

Professional

• Composer/Lyricist: Composer
• Genre: Concert
• Website: www.impulse-music.co.uk/sarahrodgers

Biography

Sarah Rodgers is a composer whose wide range of interests is reflected in the variety of commissions she has completed over recent years: solo and chamber works for piano, clarinet, cello, saxophone and doublebass; settings for Holy Communion for the Methodist Church of Great Britain; choral and orchestral music; and works exploring cross-cultural instrumentation and themes.

Her professional composing career began in 1983 when she wrote the film score for Housekeeper of the Nation, a film made about the National Trust. Since that time, a range of national 'figures' have been a recurring theme in her work: Blake's Songs of Experience; a symphonic poem to celebrate The Mary Rose; a sequence of narratives from Kipling's Kim, entitled The Roaring Whirl, which was featured at the Nottingham Now Festival in 1992 and on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM; the 1998 prize-winning setting of Acacia Tree by the English poet Kathleen Raine; and most recently, a setting for tenor and string quartet of John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River.

Sarah was the featured composer for the 30th anniversary celebrations of the Eastern Orchestral Board who commissioned a new cross-cultural work, Saigyo. Combining the forces of a Western chamber orchestra with a group of Eastern wind instruments, two Japanese shakuhachi and two North Indian bansuri, Saigyo received its first performance in Peterborough Cathedral in April 1995, performed by the City of London Sinfonia and conducted by the composer.

New works in the past couple of years have included Windhover Te Deum (commissioned for the Millennium), performed by the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra and the North London Chorus, commissions from publishers Stainer & Bell and Recital Music and Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis for a new collection of settings for use in English cathedrals. Overseas, her work has been performed in the USA, Russia, Spain, Belgium and Holland.

A recording of The King of the Golden River has been released on the SOMM label (SOMMCD 222), performed by the Coull Quartet with Richard Edgar-Wilson (tenor). A recording of The Roaring Whirl is planned for 2002 and her works for clarinet are due to be released on disc in 2003.

Sarah Rodgers is a Director of the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society Ltd (MCPS), a founder Director of the webshop tutti.co.uk, a Trustee of the British Music Information Centre (BMIC) and Chair of the Concert Executive of the British Academy of Composers & Songwriters.

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