
George Newson
(1932-2014)
George Newson was born in London in 1932. At fourteen years of age he was awarded a piano scholarship to the Blackheath Conservatoire of Music in London. Nine years later, he won another scholarship to study composition at the Royal Academy of Music with Alan Bush and Howard Ferguson. Post-graduate studies took him to the Dartington and Darmstadt summer schools during the late 50’s and early 60’s where he worked with the Americans Cage and Carter and the Italians Berio, Maderna and Nono.
In 1967 he was given a Winston Churchill Fellowship to research electronic music in the United States of America. He worked principally with Robert Moog in Trumansburg and at the University of Urbana. There he made his first tape composition, Silent Spring. Afterwards he was in the studio of RA1, Milan producing Canto 11 for Clarinet and Tape (1968); it was performed at the Venice Biennale in 1969. In the same year he worked in the studio of the University of Utrecht making his third tape composition, Genus11.
From 1972/77, Newson was the Cramb Research Fellow in Composition at Glasgow University. From 1978/81 he was Composer-in-Residence at Queen’s University, Belfast. Other major awards include grants from the Arts Council in 1965 and 1988, and two British Council tours: the first to Hungary/Romania in 1977, the second to Bulgaria in 1991. In 1984, Boulez invited George Newson to work at IRCAM in Paris; he was then commissioned to compose a work for the EnsembleInterContemporain: I will Encircle the Sun (Aphelion/Perihelion); It was performed by them in 1989.
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