John Godfrey (composer)

John Godfrey is a composer and performer, co-founder and musical director of Icebreaker (1989-1997), founder member of Crash Ensemble (1997-present), founder of the Quiet Music Ensemble, and lecturer in music at National University of Ireland, Cork

John Godfrey studied with Oliver Knussen at the Royal College of Music, Peter Maxwell Davies at the Dartington International Summer School and with Richard Orton at the University of York, where he graduated with a BA Hons in music (1983) and an MPhil in composition (1989). While a student there, he gained an enthusiasm for both composition and performance of new music. He conducted extensively, giving the world premieres of a large number of student works and the UK premieres of several major pieces by professional composers including those of Arvo Pärt's "Tabula Rasa" and Arne Nordheim's "Spur". In something of a baptism by fire, the first piece he ever conducted was Stockhausen's "Trans"!

In 1989 he and another York graduate formed the new-music group Icebreaker, which went on to become one of the most successful ensembles in its field, appearing extensively in Europe and America. The group made several CDs for Decca Argo, New Tone and Donemus, which include John's works "Euthanasia and Garden Instruments" and "S U S Y W I M P S", as well as his arrangements of Diderik Wagenaar's "Metrum" and Steve Martland's "Shoulder to Shoulder". John appears as a performer on all Icebreaker's CDs up to and including "Rogue's Gallery".

Other early works include "Demissus Spero" for wind band, "The Great Chicken of Kiev" for Symphony Orchestra and "String Quartet (1990)" for Wind Quintet and Peter and Roland (with Ian Mellish.

Having left Icebreaker in 1997, John was invited to join, as a pianist, what was then Ireland's newest group, Crash Ensemble. It quickly became Ireland's foremost and most adventurous new-music ensemble, and has performed not only frequently in Dublin but also throughout Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Canada and the USA. The group has worked with a number of notable soloists including Joanna McGregor and Harry Sparnaay. In February 2000, the group gave the European Premiere of John's "Differing Sobriety", which had been commissioned and premiered by the New York-based group Bang on a Can.

During 2001 John took a year's sabbatical leave in Hong Kong and Australia, where he studied computer music techniques and the current scenes in Asian and Australian new music and completed a commission for a new work for Icebreaker, "Gallows Hill", from the Bang On A Can festival of New York (with funds from the Arts Council of Ireland). Also, amongst other pieces completed during this period, is "Aria 51", for piano the UK premiere of which was given by Andrew Zolinsky at the Vale of Glamorgan Festival in September 2003.

Other recent works include "Call of the Carolina Parakeet" (2005), for Crash Ensemble, which received its premiere in Cork in spring 2005 and "for David Adams" (2005), for organ, which has been recorded for a forthcoming CD release.

John's particular compositional influences include minimalists and post-minimalists, the most formative being, perhaps, Louis Andriessen and the Hague School. He has particular interests in work that exhibits Cage's idea that certain kinds of new music are about "perception, and the arousal of it in us". He is fascinated with the analytical concept of depth-coherence in music - and, intermittently, other forms of human endeavour - and with performance, most especially the performance of contemporary music.

Since 1993, he has lectured in new music and composition at the National University of Ireland, Cork, where he founded the Cork Festival of New Music. In 2008 he founded the Quiet Music Ensemble devoted to "music that invites deep attention and perceptive listening; music that is immersive, reflective, and introspective; music that is an experimentation with, and meditation on sound itself and our relationship with it."