Ned McGowan
| Ned McGowan | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1970 (age 46–47) |
| Genres | Contemporary classical music |
| Occupation(s) | Composer |
| Instruments | Flute, Contrabass Flute |
| Labels | Karnatic Lab Records |
| Website | www |
Ned McGowan (born 1970) is an American composer and flutist based in Amsterdam. Ned holds degrees in composition from the Royal Conservatory Den Haag and in flute from the Cleveland Institute of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
“McGowan’s music strives for an idiom in which various musics – American popular, European classical and avant-garde, Carnatic, a fascination with proportionally intricate rhythms, the use of microtones in the search for new subtleties of melody – and many others, rub against each other and generate new meanings.”
- musicologist Bob Gilmore.
“If you are having a slow day, his samples will wake you right up.”
Ned McGowan is a composer, teacher, flutist, improviser and curator. Known for rhythmical vitality and technical virtuosity, his music has won awards and been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw and other halls and festivals around the world by many orchestras, ensembles and soloists.
Ned’s compositions are often informed by his experiences as a flutist in European contemporary, improvisational and non-western musical circles and his main artistic goal is to create self-contained musical worlds through a process of cross-genre translation. By utilizing the possibilities of notation and a variety of performance practice approaches, he seeks to create practical methods to universal, cultural and personal expressions.
Orchestras who have performed his works include American Composers Orchestra, Valdosta Symphony Orchestra and the Dutch orchestras Radio Kamer Filharmonie, Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, Gelders Orkest, Rotterdam Sinfonia and Ricciotti. Ensembles include Aleph, Array Music, Atlantic Chamber Ensemble, Duo Blow, Calefax, David Kweksilber Big Band, Flexible Music, Great Noise, Hexnut, Insomnio, Klang, MMM…, musikFabrik, Nederlands Blazers Ensemble, Nederlands Fluit Orkest, BlowUp Flute Octet, Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Post & Mulder Piano Duo, Sax & Stix, Spinifex, Ensemble Scala, Trio Scordatura, Ensemble Verge, Wervelwind, Zapp4 String Quartet, Zephyr String Quartet and soloists including Susanna Borsch, Helen Bledsoe, Keiko Shichijo, Guy Livingston, Tatiana Koleva/Rutger Oterloo, Francesca Thompson, Greg Oakes, Reiko Manabe, Mysore Manjunath, Derek Bermel, Sarah Jeffrey, Egbert Jan Louwerse and Eric Vloeimans.
Ned’s piece Tools, winner of the Henriette Bosmans Prize (NL), was described as “brutal and humorous” (Geneco), while at the same time “packed with discreet acoustic rooms, some more resonant than others, but all proving that... subtlety pays off” (Guy Livingston, Paris Transatlantic). His work “Wood Burn grew to be the highpoint of the evening” (Mark van de Voort, the Brabants Dagblad). Hans van Lissum (www.cut-up.com) wrote, “the compositions of band leader Ned McGowan, very complex in many ways, are especially well put together. Live performance also allows them to breathe enough, by optimally taking advantage of theatrical aspects….” In 2014, he was awarded the Alumni Achievement Award from the Cleveland Institute of Music.
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Wikipedia