Philip Hammond (composer)

Early life and education

Hammond was born in Belfast. After studying at Cabin Hill Preparatory School and Campbell College, Belfast, Hammond graduated from Queen's University Belfast in l974 as a Bachelor of Music and Master of Arts. In 2003 he was awarded a Doctorate of Music from Queen’s.

Career as a composer

While teaching at Cabin Hill, Hammond regularly performed as a pianist and accompanist with the mezzo-soprano Daphne Arlow and in a piano duo with Michael McGuffin, performing and presenting for BBC Radio Ulster, BBC Radio Three and RTE.

His first major commission, Thanatos (1977), was written for the choir of the Royal Victoria Hospital. It became controversial when what was to have been its first live performance was disrupted when some of the original singers objected to the piece on "moral grounds". Following publicity on the BBC, Radio Three offered to record the first performance. That studio performance, with the Choir of St Anne's Cathedral, was broadcast throughout the UK and subsequently performed live at the Ulster Museum by a different grouping of performers. The work is dedicated to the composer and academic Adrian Thomas.

Hammond received a commission from Radio Three, and Narcissus, a setting of poems by George Barker, was performed by Lontano and mezzo-soprano Linda Hirst in April 1981 as part of the Sonorities Festival of Twentieth Century Music. It was later broadcast by BBC Radio Three and received a London premiere by the same performers in 1982.

One of Hammonds most frequently performed pieces, French Blue, was commissioned by the GPA Dublin International Piano Competition. It was a test piece for the competition. He later wrote two companion pieces Irish Green for Iain Burnside and African Black for Ruth McGinley who had reached the finals of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition in 1993 and who had played French Blue as part of that competition.

His Waterfront Fanfares (1997) were written for the opening of the Waterfront Hall, Belfast; and his work for piano and orchestra ... the starry dynamo in the machinery of night ... was commissioned by Queen's University Belfast for a concert marking the award of an honorary degree to President Bill Clinton in 2001. It was subsequently performed on a tour of the United States by Barry Douglas and Camerata Ireland in Belfast's Waterfront Hall.

Many of Hammond's pieces have a strong literary association. His orchestral piece Die Ersten Blumen (1996) was a response to a poem by Hermann Hesse. The White Lake (1999) was a choral and orchestral setting of a specially commissioned poem by Michael Longley, and one of his most recent large-scale compositions, Psalms and Songs from the Hebrew (2000) for chorus and orchestra, was a setting of mediaeval Jewish poetry from Spain.

His work ... while the sun shines was commissioned by BBC Radio Three for performance in September 2005 and celebrates the music of the great Irish conductor and composer Sir Hamilton Harty (in 1979, Philip Hammond contributed two chapters to a book on Sir Hamilton Harty published by Blackstaff Press).

Arts Council

Hammond was a Director at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. While at the Arts Council, Hammond spent two years seconded to the Northern Ireland government to design and manage an international arts festival in Washington DC to accompany Northern Ireland's role as a featured region in the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

After he retired from the Arts Council, Hammond continues to compose, write, and is a regular presenter and correspondent on the BBC and the Irish state broadcaster RTÉ as an arts correspondent and music critic. He currently writes for The Belfast Telegraph and the Culture Northern Ireland website.

Hammond composed a series of piano pieces focused on Lorca and written for the Irish pianist Cathal Breslin for his debut recital at the Carnegie Hall, New York, in June 2009.

In April 2012, the first performance of his Requiem for the Lost Souls of the Titanic was performed in Belfast Cathedral on hundredth anniversary of the sinking. This large-scale work was broadcast by the BBC and RTÉ.