KERRY ANDREW - UK
BORN 5 APRIL
Kerry Andrew is a composer, performer and author. She has a PhD in Composition from the University of York and has won four British Composer Awards. As a composer, she specialises in experimental vocal and choral music, music-theatre and community music. She performs with the award-winning Juice Vocal Ensemble and with her alt-folk band You Are Wolf. Her debut novel, Swansong, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2018. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018.
Kerry made her BBC Proms debut in 2017 with No Place Like, a new commission for the BBC Ten Pieces scheme. Her works have included a large-scale piece for 600 singers, orchestral/rock players and music-tech makers in the Royal Albert Hall’s Schools Prom; a concept drawing and vocal EP for Art on the Underground; a work simultaneously performed by 25 community ensembles around the UK for the Landmark Trust; an ‘open-source’ piece for audiences to complete for recorder quintet; a piece for the London Sinfonietta to fight for the NHS (including the recorded voices of 60 members of the public, including actor/campaigner Michael Sheen); and a work for the national commemoration service one year on from commemorate the 7/7/05 London bombings. She was Handel House Composer In Residence 2010-12 and has been a Visiting Professor at Leeds College of Music.
In 2010, Kerry won her first British Composer Award for her choral work Fall in the Making Music category. In 2014, she won in the Stage Works category for her wild swimming opera Dart’s Love, and the Education and Community Category for her community chamber opera Woodwose, written for Wigmore Hall. In 2017, she won her fourth award for her vocal/body percussion work‘who we are’, premiered by the 600 singers of the massed National Youth Choirs of Great Britain at the Royal Albert Hall.
Kerry was a British Council / PRS for Music Foundation Musician in Residence in China, spending five weeks in the Henan Province in 2016. She made collaborative new rock/traditional-inspired songs based on foxes in folklore.
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MARIA LUIZA OZAITA - SPAIN
DIED 5 APRIL
Maria Luisa Ozaita was a Spanish composer, pianist and lecturer. Maria Luisa Ozaita Marqués was born on May 20th 1939 in Barakaldo, Vizcaya, Spain. She first studied music with Fernando Remacha, continuing this education through an "exchange scholarship" scheme in Copenhagen with Leif Thybo and K J Isaksen. She gained degrees in piano, harpsichord, composition, conducting and singing, and also further studied harpsichord in France with Kenneth Gilbert, as well as at Darmstadt in Germany. As a concert pianist, Ozaita performed internationally in Europe, North America and the Eastern bloc, and collaborated in chamber music with some of the great interpreters, such as Antonio Arias, R Ramos, Esperanza Abad, Dimitar Furdnadjiev and José Luis Rodrigo (the latter pairing having formed the only harpsichord/guitar classical duo known in Spain at the time).
Her original compositions were often performed internationally too - she composed mainly chamber and symphonic works (her opera "Pelleas y Melisanda" was considered to be of great importance), but was also known for her guitar compositions. She played at many festivals of contemporary music, such as in Alicante, Tres Cantos, at the "Comunidad de Madrid" and in Fiuggi, Italy. Ozaita also received commissions to compose from "INAEM", the "Comunidad de Madrid", the "Fundación Canal", the "Festival de Fiuggi Italy" and the "Comunidad de Andalucia". She was a lecturer in music history, and published professional articles in various magazines such as "Confutatis" and "OpusMusica". She also contributed to the book "Women in Music" by Patricia Adkins Chiti, collaborating later on the Spanish edition of the same book. She was a member of La Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del Pais and was founding president of the Spanish Association of Women in Music. Maria Luisa Ozaita died in Madrid on April 5th 2017, at the age of 77.
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Arrayanes by Maria Luiza Ozaita
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