A.-McEwan, James
Greek-Scottish composer and electric guitarist whose work seeks a space between contemporary classical, offbeat rock, improvisational and electronic music, and also includes installation-esque musical performances.
In 2016 he earned a First-Class Honours BMus in composition from Birmingham Conservatoire, where he had studied under Andrew Hamilton, Ed Bennett, and Riaan Vosloo, and won the Birmingham Chamber Music Society Composition Prize. In 2018 he earned an MMus in composition from The Royal Conservatoire of the Hague, where he studied under Yannis Kyriakides and Guus Janssen, receiving a distinction “for the development of a new musical praxis and relation with audience through new techniques and technology.” His works have been performed in many major Dutch venues including the Korzo Theatre in The Hague, Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam, and Tivoli Vredenburg contemporary music centre in Utrecht. His music has been featured in the Gaudeamus Muziekweek in Utrecht. His compositions have also been presented in Portugal (Casa da Música in Porto), Greece (Onassis Stegi in Athens), Canada, South Korea, Germany, Czechia, Malaysia, and the United States. He was a resident composer to the Canadian Quatuor Bozzini (2018), a featured composer in the Nieuw Ensemble’s Evening of Today 2018, and was commissioned by The Hague Municipality’s 2018 annual conference, for which he developed the technologically complex audiovisual work Detached [but InterConnected -?-). The orchestral version of his Reverb Music was performed under Ilan Volkov at the 2019 Tectonics Festival in Athens. In August 2019 he had his performance/installation work More Layers presented at the Music in Pyeongchang Festival in South Korea. The audio-visual project Flowers/Ghosts&Echoes, recorded on Polyscope’s album \\\\\\\\\ drift /////// flux \\\\\\\\\ change |||||||||, was also featured in the 2021 Rewire Festival in The Hague. With the band Quaich, he released the album and now that we are here (Polyscope, 2020). He has also composed the soundtracks for Eline Benjaminsen’s film Footprints in The Valley, and for the four-hour-long video/installation project Document, created by Mihály Stefanovicz and presented in Tromsø in 2020.
Selected works: Reverb Music for piano and eight sustaining instruments (original version, 2016), Place for 3–6 instruments, tape and reverberance (2016), Layers for many smartphones and/ or other video playback devices (2017), Torrents and Streams for flute, cello, trombone, piano, percussion, two electric guitars and laptop (and/or smartphone) ensemble hidden in the audience (2017), Is It Working? for large pipe organ and two MIDI-controlled large pipe organs (2017), Polluters for microtonal mixed ensemble including replicas of Harry Partch’s instrument designs (2018), Detached [but interconnected-?-) for small mixed ensemble, array of speakers, tape and audience smartphones (2018), More Layers for 12 players (flexible instrumentation) spread across the performance space, tape, coloured lights / multiple spatial projections, audioreactive lights and audience smartphones (2018), blurry, glitched, and jumbled for saxophone octet and eight small speakers (2018), Reverb Music, version for orchestra (2019), Melodies Against Each Other, version for ensemble (2021), a/mi(d)st a/noise_and, -[d]is_interference/// for six percussionists, small speakers, tape and audience smartphones (2022).