Biography

Sohrab Uduman was born in Sri-Lanka in 1962. He began his musical life as a clarinettist, at the University of Surrey, and went on to study composition at the University of Birmingham with Vic Hoyland and Jonty Harrison . His music has received several awards, including an international prize at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary MusicThe Bourges International Competition for Electro-acoustic Music, the George Butterworth Award, the Oskar Back Foundation Prize for Young European Composers and first prize in the Prix Annelie de Man 2012 Composer’s Competition . Sohrab Uduman’s music has featured at many festivals, including the Oxford Festival of Contemporary MusicThe Spitalfields Festival, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Cheltenham International Festival of Music, Darmstadt , Britten Festival Brugges and Agora Festival at the Centre Georges Pompidou Paris.

Recent works include Tracing metamorphoses for string quartet and live computer transformation commissioned by the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) for the Arditti Quartet. Current projects include a series of compositions for instruments and real-time computer processing; these include Breath across autumnal ground for harpsichord and live electronics, performed at the Spitz, London and Ausruf for quarter-tone trumpet and live electronics, which received its first performance at St. Pauls, Huddersfield in October 2007. He was Lecturer in Composition at the University of Durham from 1991-1996 and currently works in the Department of Music & Music Technology at the University of Keele where he is Programmes Director of Music and Music Technology.  Uduman was appointed as Reader at Keele in February 2010.

Future plans include: a forthcoming performance at the Sound and Music Cutting Edge concert series in London of Breath across autumnal ground; a collaborative work with a colleague on a song cycle which will explore the fusion of traditional materials and form with contemporary compositional praxis and a composition for the Radcliffe Bell duo. Uduman is also interested in working with artists from other media and is currently working on a project making use of film and drawing. The resulting work Derriere le miroir with live drawing by Jon Barraclough was performed at the King’s Place, London in June 2012.  Mostly recently, Uduman was selected as the winner of OPUS2016 , Britten Sinfonia’s open submission scheme for unrepresented composers. He received a commission to write a new work for piano trio for the orchestra’s award-winning At Lunch series to be premiered in December 2016.

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