EDMUND HUNT
Edmund Hunt is a British composer. His work has been performed by ensembles including Psappha, The Royal Northern Sinfonia, CHROMA, BCMG, ICARUS Vocal Ensemble, The Curious Chamber Players and CoMA (Contemporary Music for All). In January 2019, his choral work 'Vita Hominum' (composed for the Adopt A Composer scheme and performed by The Singers) was given a 25 minute feature on BBC Radio 3. In 2014, he was selected for the London Philharmonic Orchestra's Leverhulme Young Composers' programme. His composition 'Argatnél' was performed by the LPO in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and was reviewed in the Telegraph as 'the most delicately beautiful piece of the evening'.
Edmund has an MA from the University of Cambridge and an MMus from Newcastle University. In 2018 he was awarded a PhD in composition from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, where he studied with Edwin Roxburgh, Joe Cutler, and Simon Hall. In 2018 he became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Arts, Design and Media at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham City University. As a practice-based researcher at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's Integra Lab, Edmund's work focuses on composition, language, text and electronics.
Much of Edmund’s music is inspired by the early medieval literature of northern Europe, and his PhD explored this area through the creation of vocal, instrumental and electronic works. Although he often uses early texts, his approach is innovative and contemporary.
Recent projects include a new work for string quartet, dance and live electronics, for Sound and Music's New Voices scheme, and pieces for Hard Rain SoloistEnsemble (Belfast) and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (Birmingham) in 2022, and Das Neue Ensemble (Hannover) in 2023, as part of my AHRC-funded project, Augmented Vocality: Recomposing the Sounds of Early Irish and Old Norse.
NEWS
Threnos chosen by Ensemble Dynamique to be performed at Xenakis Today, Paris, on the 6th of May 2024
My piece will be written for clarinet, cello, piano and electronics. The electronics will consist of short samples of poetry, spoken in Old Irish, often transformed, lengthened, and repeated so that they blend with the ensemble. As the piece progresses, more and more words emerge from the texture. The music becomes like an echo or memory of the Old Irish poem. The concert performance will be preceded by a short talk about the work.
Augmented Vocality Concert Videos Online
Videos of some of the Augmented Vocality premieres are now available to watch via Royal Birmingham Conservatoire's Integra Lab website
in June 2023, I took part in a research forum led by Dr Zubin Kanga at Royal Holloway University, focusing on practice-based approaches involving music and technology. Our paper, published by the National Centre for Research Methods, can be accessed via the link above.
'Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music' was a recipient of the RMA's Practice Research Prize. The citation noted that '[Edmund's] work builds on the rich and ongoing body of work on ambiguity of the voice in electroacoustic music, but through composition with untranslated, early medieval poetry and its ‘electroacoustic vocality’. Hunt’s exposition provides a clear context (across theory and practice) for the insights developed through his compositional work, as well as detailed exemplars and discussion of the works themselves.
Augmented Vocality: Recomposing the Sounds of Early Irish and Old Norse
In November 2020, I started work on a 2-year project, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). As a co-investigator and lead composer, I worked with colleagues from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the University of Cambridge, writing music for BCMG, Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble and Das Neue Ensemble. Read more about the project at the UK Research and Innovation site.
To read about the latest work carried out by members of our team, visit the Augmented Vocality/Integra Lab blog page.
© EDMUND HUNT 2024
