Staff profile
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BA, BMus, MMus. DipRAM, PhD
Professor of Composition and Contemporary Music
Roderick Watkins pursued undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Composition in the US (at Oberlin) before returning to the UK to follow postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won all the main composition prizes and eventually held a Leverhulme teaching fellowship. His composition teachers have included Richard Hoffmann, Paul Patterson and Hans Werner Henze.
While completing his PhD he spent a year at IRCAM in Paris, on the Cursus de Composition et Informatique Musicale, and since then several of his compositions have involved both acoustic and electronic instruments. His principal interest in electronics lies in sound synthesis, and he later returned to IRCAM as a "compositeur en recherche," working with the team developing the physical modelling synthesis programme Modalys.
His compositions include a full-length chamber opera, The Juniper Tree, which was commissioned by the 5th Munich Biennale festival, and premiered in 1997 in Munich and in London (at the Almeida festival) by the London Sinfonietta under Markus Stenz. Electronics played an important role in The Juniper Tree and were combined with opera again in 2003 when Watkins was commissioned by Hans Werner Henze and the Salzburg Festival to produce the electronic material for Henze's latest opera L'Upupa which was premiered at the Salzburg festival that summer. Since then the production has travelled around several of Europe's leading opera houses, and been issued on DVD.
Other electroacoustic compositions include The Looking Glass, for chamber ensemble and computer, (produced at IRCAM), and Sound in Space, a computer music installation for the Bath Festival. Instruments and electronics were also combined in a full-length "mime-drama," Labirinto, commissioned by the Montepulciano Festival (in Italy).
Orchestral compositions include Red Light, written for the London Sinfonietta and broadcast by them on Radio 3, Who Walked Between and Still, both pieces written for and premiered by the Britten Sinfonia, and Light's Horizon commissioned by the Johns Hopkins University Symphony Orchestra in the United States. Chamber music includes A Valediction: Of Weeping (for soprano, microtonal recorders and prepared piano), Last Light (for clarinet and piano), and At the Horizon (for flute and piano). His most recent compositions include a Clarinet Quintet and Breath, a setting for soprano and chamber ensemble of several poems by George Szirtes.
At Christ Church, Roderick Watkins is Programme Director for the undergraduate programmes in Music, and teaches various courses in composition and contemporary music. He currently supervises six MPhil/PhD students working in composition, electroacoustic composition or contemporary music, and has supervised to successful completion several others. In 2005 he was appointed Professor of Composition and Contemporary Music.
He is a founding member of the Sounds New festival's artistic committee, and regularly directs concerts of young composers' works in the Canterbury festival. He has acted as a PhD external examiner for the University of London and is currently external examiner for the University of Ulster's MMus programme.