Martin Suckling

Education

Suckling was born in Glasgow and attended Bearsden Academy. He read music at Clare College, Cambridge and went on to study composition with George Benjamin at King's College London. He was Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale University where he studied with Ezra Laderman and Martin Bresnick in the Yale School of Music. On returning to the UK he undertook doctoral research at the Royal Academy of Music, supervised by Simon Bainbridge.

Career

While still a student, Suckling received commissions from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (Play, 2005) and the London Symphony Orchestra (The Moon, the Moon!, 2007). He won the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize in 2008, leading to a commission from the Wigmore Hall for the Aronowitz Ensemble (To See the Dark Between, 2010). In 2011, the London Sinfonietta commission and premiere of Candlebird, a song cycle to texts by Don Paterson, led to critical acclaim. Subsequent commissions have come from ensembles such as the London Contemporary Orchestra, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Ensemble and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, with whom Suckling was appointed Associate Composer in 2014.

Previously Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Somerville College, Oxford, since 2012 Suckling has been a Lecturer in the Music Department at the University of York, where he teaches courses in Composition, Orchestration, and Spectral Music.

Suckling's music often explores aspects of microtonality, and he has acknowledged his debt in this regard to composers associated with spectral music. Other influences include Scottish folk music – Suckling was a fiddle player in several ceilidh bands in his teens – and literature, especially poetry.

Key works

Discography