Nationality Australian Role Composer | Name Jonathan Little Occupation Composer Albums Whole Again | |
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Jonathan David Little FRSA (born 1965 in Melbourne, Australia) is a contemporary classical composer and author based in the UK. In 2008 his first CD was voted one of the top recordings of the year by US Fanfare magazine ("The Want List 2008"). He was subsequently featured in a news article in Musical Opinion in early 2009. As a composer, he first came to prominence in America in 2006 when The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) ran an article on him having five of his works accepted for recording (2004–07) by the US-headquartered French contemporary music label ERM (Editions de la Rue Margot), aimed at showcasing international contemporary composers. He was awarded the Collard Fellowship of the Worshipful Company of Musicians in 2011, and in 2012 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was appointed inaugural Professor of Composition at the University of Chichester in 2017.
Contents
- Life
- Music and background
- Career and writings
- Symphonic and orchestral
- Chamber and instrumental
- Choral and vocal
- Recordings
- Writings
- References
Life
In 2009 Little received a grant from the Musicians' Benevolent Fund to work on a second CD of his compositions, entitled Polyhymnia.
In 2017, thanks to funding from the Australia Council, a CD of sacred and secular choral works was released on the US Navona label - featuring intricate “polychoral” techniques: multi-part, multi-divisi, solo, echo and spatial effects - with the aim of rediscovering, in contemporary form, the lost potential of the acoustics of performing spaces, as derived from late Renaissance and early Baroque models, in which such techniques were often much exploited.
Music and background
Little's music is notable for its "mystical beauty, intensity and richness of material". He studied Composition, Performance and Musicology with Peter Dennison at the University of Melbourne, where he won the Lady Turner Exhibition for overall excellence, and a St. Mary's College Academic Prize (where he was a resident student from 1984–87). He holds the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in music for his research at Monash University into the development of "exotic" 19th- and 20th-century orchestration, and has written and broadcast extensively on this, and related topics, often in the context of wider cultural history and related art forms.
In 2008, the first compilation album of his music was released, entitled Terpsichore and Other Works, which Cambridge University Press's new music journal, Tempo, described as a "ground-breaking tour de force … incandescent", while, in America, Fanfare magazine referred to its "music of tremendous power… [and] astonishing range of colors and moods". US critic Lynn René Bayley ranked the album second among her Top 5 worldwide releases for the year (in Fanfare's "Want List 2008"), citing "a major new, original and quite brilliant classical voice". Terpsichore is one of a series of epic orchestral tone pictures on the theme of the legendary "Nine Muses" – and the complete series remains a work-in-progress.
Jonathan Little works in a variety of genres, including large-scale choral, string and symphonic works. Recordings have been supported by the Foundation for New Music (US), the Kenneth Leighton Trust (UK) and ASCAP (US). A second disc (released in early 2012), entitled Polyhymnia (The Muse of Sacred Poetry), appeared on the Navona label of PARMA Recordings (US), supported by ASCAP and the Musicians Benevolent Fund. Cambridge University Press's Tempo reported that "Polyhymnia conjures up a heart-rending panorama: it is immensely poetic, almost otherworldly, and employs an exceptionally hypnotic array of musical colour." Soon after its release, Polyhymnia was nominated in Spain as "Best Album of the Year". In December 2011, Little was elected The John Clementi Collard Fellow in Music of the Worshipful Company of Musicians - "one of the most prestigious awards" of the City of London's ancient Musicians' Company (established in 1500). Little joins the relatively few composers to have received this award - alongside such former Collard Fellows as Herbert Howells, Constant Lambert, William Alwyn, Edmund Rubbra, Gordon Jacob and Alan Rawsthorne. Little was also awarded a PRS For Music Foundation / Bliss Trust Composer Bursary in 2012, to support the composition of the next work in his "Nine Muses" series - Erato. In 2015, Little was granted an Australian Government / Australia Council "Individual International Arts Project Award", to help fund the creation of an album of multi-part, a cappella polychoral music (or contemporary cori spezzati). He was also one of only seven living composers whose work was selected for the Royal Philharmonic Society and BBC Radio 3's "ENCORE Choral" Programme – for performance and broadcast during 2016-17. In October 2016, he was selected to participate in a BBC Singers’ Choral Music Workshop, led by Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music, and in January 2017 became recipient of a Special Distinction in the ASCAP Rudolf Nissim Prize competition (USA) – "one of the concert music world’s most esteemed awards."
Career and writings
Jonathan Little has also pursued an academic and writing career. He was appointed Senior Lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University in 1999 on their Music Industry Management course (the first such degree course in Europe) – where he specialised in the workings of the British and international recording industry, and taught songwriting analysis. In 2001, he became Principal of the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford, England – Europe's largest specialist academy for students of contemporary music, and the first music education establishment to win the Queen's Award for Enterprise (Innovation category). Having acted as a Curriculum Consultant to the British and Irish Modern Music Institute, and Visiting Lecturer in Media Music Composition at the University of Surrey, Little became Reader (2012), and then Professor (2017), in Music Composition and Music History at the University of Chichester.
An authority on aspects of composition, orchestration and songwriting, Little is listed in the Music Publishers Association (UK) Register of Expert Musicologists. In 2005, he was appointed Consultant Editor to A&C Black's flagship volume of musical reference, the Musicians’ and Songwriters’ Yearbook, and he has contributed articles on the future of music to the Hudson Institute's American Outlook magazine, and the British Academy's Heart & Soul: Revealing the Craft of Songwriting (published by Sanctuary to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Ivor Novello Awards). His writings on the future of the music industry initially stemmed from a report surveying the first European digital distribution conference in 2000, and subsequently with Scottish music industry analyst JoJo Gould, he co-founded and edited Music Business Journal (ISSN 1473-6233) – which in the early 2000s was "one of the world's first online music business journals."
Little has written two substantial academic studies on musical orientalism and exotic orchestration for EMP, New York:The Influence of European Literary and Artistic Representations of the 'Orient' on Western Orchestral Compositions, ca.1840-1920: From Oriental Inspiration to 'Exotic' Orchestration, together with its companion volume, Literary Sources of Nineteenth-Century Musical Orientalism: The Hypnotic Spell of the Exotic on Music of the Romantic Period. (This authoritative 950-page, two-volume study won an Authors' Foundation/Royal Literary Fund Award for 2011.) Many of Little's compositions are issued by Wirripang – "Australia's leading independent fine music publisher." The National Library of Australia holds copies of Little's selected verse, and all his published musical works. Selected recordings of his music are on deposit at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive, with many scores and recordings also held by the Australian Music Centre.