Joseph Phibbs

Joseph Phibbs (born 1974) is an English composer of orchestral, choral and chamber music. He has also composed for theatre, both in the UK and Japan. Since 1998 he has written regularly to commissions for Festivals (including for Cheltenham, Aldeburgh, Presteigne, and Three Choirs), for private sponsors, and for the B.B.C., which has broadcast premieres of his orchestral and chamber works from the Proms and elsewhere. His works have been given premieres in Europe, the United States and the Far East, and he has received prestigious awards, including most recently a British Composer Award (for Rivers to the Sea), and a Library of Congress Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation Award. Many of his works have been premiered by leading international musicians, including Dame Evelyn Glennie, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Leonard Slatkin, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Gianandrea Noseda, and the Belcea Quartet.

Joseph Phibbs was born in London. A pianist and cellist, he started composing at the age of ten, and from 1988 to 1992 attended the Purcell School for Young Musicians with the assistance of a scholarship from Suffolk County Council. During this time he received tuition in composition from Param Vir. In 1992 he continued his studies at King's College London, where he was taught by Sir Harrison Birtwistle, and where he obtained a BMus degree with a First, taking the Purcell Prize: in 1996 he received an MMus in Composition, having received a British Academy grant.

In that year he was a winner of the BBC Young Composers' Forum, which marked the beginning of a long association with the BBC. A commission in 2001 for his first large-scale orchestral work, In Camera, was premiered at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin: Lumina, for the Last Night of the Proms 2003, was televised from the Royal Albert Hall; and more recently Partita was a joint BBC/Serge Koussevitzky Foundation Award commission. From 1997-2001 he studied at Cornell University towards a doctorate of Musical Arts with Steven Stucky, a teacher and later friend who became a major influence on his music. Many of his orchestral and chamber works are now published by Ricordi (part of the Universal Music Publishing Group), with a number of unaccompanied choral works published by Boosey & Hawkes.

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