Philip Sheppard is a composer specialising in film and television soundtracks, a solo cellist and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. His blog contains an ample and impressive biography, detailing the highlights of his long and distinguished career. 

His early solo albums, ‘The Glass Cathedral’ and ‘The Diver in the Crypt’, featured new compositions devised for site-specific  performances. The albums received rave reviews on release and are regularly played on Radio 3. The tracks feature a specially  commissioned electric cello that has become a cornerstone of many of  Philip’s compositions. The albums attracted the attention of Scott Walker, who invited him to play at his Southbank Centre Meltdown Festival. They collaborated again on Pulp’s album ‘We Love Life’ with Jarvis Cocker and after that on Walker’s critically acclaimed album ‘The Drift’. He has also arranged songs for Jarvis Cocker’s solo album ‘Jarvis’, David Bowie and Suzanne Vega.

Philip regularly collaborates with James Lavelle and UNKLE. They have recently written and produced the forthcoming album ’End Titles….Stories For Film’ (with Gavin Clark, Josh Homme, Chris Goss and Pablo Clements) following the success of the recent album ‘War Stories’.

His first orchestral soundtrack was commissioned for the documentary  feature, ‘In the Shadow of the Moon’, which won major awards at the  Boulder, Florida, Indianapolis and Sedona film festivals, as well as the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2009 he recorded a score for Sergio directed by Greg Barker which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and will be broadcast on HBO and the BBC.

Philip was commissioned to write and produce the music for the  Olympic Handover Ceremony, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.   This marked the point when the Olympic flag passed to  London in preparation for the 2012 games.  His composition ‘This is London’ performed by the London Symphony Orchestra acted as an overture to a new version of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, featuring Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis - produced by Steve Robson, Page, Lewis and Philip. This was performed from the top of an unfolding London double decker bus.

Philip was also commissioned to arrange and direct a new arrangement of the British National Anthem for these events, which has subsequently been used by City Hall in London for its citizenship ceremonies. Philip has produced the music for two recent BBC TV live events; The Manchester Passion and The Liverpool Nativity. These have won numerous awards, including the BBC award for Best Music Production of the year, which was awarded to Philip, together with the writer Stephen Powell.

Philip has completed a suite for piano, strings and electronics that forms the soundtrack for Robert Winston’s new series, ‘Superdoctors’, shown on BBC1 in the Autumn.

Philip is also currently writing a set of pieces for Viol Consort, to be recorded by Fretwork and vocal consort Alamire which will form the soundtrack for Dr David Starkey’s forthcoming series on Henry VIII on Channel Four, broadcast to mark the 500th anniversary of Henry’s accession to the throne.

His piano composition ‘Crystallised Beauty’ has received over 100,000 hits on YouTube after being used as the soundtrack for the ITV Jane Austen Season trailers.

Philip is proud to have had a long and fruitful professional relationship with Akram Khan.  He first joined Akram as an improvising  cellist in the Kathak projects ‘Third Catalogue‘ and ‘Ronin’, collaborating with Hanif Kureishi and the AK Company for ‘The God of  Small Tales’.

In 2006, Philip was commissioned to write ‘Sacred  Monsters’ for Akram and Sylvie Guillem. He toured with the production  until the Summer of 2007, his final performance being at the Herod Atticus Theatre in the shadow of the Parthenon.

In 2008 he wrote the score for In-I featuring Juliette Binoche and Akram Khan, with stage design by Anish Kapoor, and lighting by Michael Hulls.

His groundbreaking work for multitracked cellos, Rain Steam and Speed, was featured in Theatre de Complicite’s acclaimed The Elephant Vanishes - based on short stories by Haruki Murakami.

Philip has recently written concert works for Alexander McQueen, ShowStudio, Yves St Laurent and Nick Knight. His work Sarabande in Blackwas performed live by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields as the accompaniment to McQueen’s Paris Fashion week show. Philip improvised a live soundtrack for the 24 hour live transmission devised by ShowStudio for Yves St Laurent, and his concert work Victorian Waltz has recently been used as the soundtrack to a film shot by Nick Knight and Ruth Hogben. Cello and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music, during which time he specialised in contemporary music. He worked closely with Hans Werner Henze, Sir Michael Tippett and Luciano Berio during this time as a founder member of The Kreutzer String  Quartet.

Whilst a student, Philip made weekly appearances at The Spitz nightclub, playing entirely improvised concerts, sometimes featuring  his Piano Quintet - formed with Keith Tippett. He collaborated with  pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, who encouraged him to move away from a  conventional musical environment, and pursue his composition.

He went  on to pioneer electro-acoustic improvisation joining the Smith Quartet and appearing regularly with the London Sinfonietta. After completing a Fellowship, he was made a Professor at the Royal Academy of Music  where he is now a Senior Lecturer.

As a member of the Composers Ensemble he joined Jeff Buckley onstage in the 1995 Meltdown festival, to play continuo cello for Jeff’s performance of Dido’s lament.

This entry was written by Ashley Morgan, posted on February 27, 2009 at 12:17 pm, filed under Musicians and tagged Abdullah Ibrahim, Aelxander McQueen, Akram Khan, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Keidis, David Bowie, David Starkey, Greg Barker, Hanif Kureishi, Haruki Murakami, James Lavelle, Jarvis Cocker, Jean Michel-Jarre, Jeff Buckley, Jimmy Page, Julliette Binoche, Keith Tippet, Led Zeppelin, Leona Lewis, Nick Knight, Philip Sheppard, Pulp, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Scott Walker, Suzanne Vega, Sylvie Guillem, UNKLE, Yves St Laurent. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.

Peter Gregson is a cellist who uses his blog successfully to promote himself, his work, and his numerous projects. I’ll let Peter’s impressive biography offer a formal online introduction.

Peter Gregson is an award winning cellist and pioneer of contemporary music, reinvigorating the classical genre by embracing contemporary culture and technologies. From full capacity concerts in churches, to web-based recitals and free-standing events in warehouses, his aim is to find the pulse of contemporary music and engage the mass of otherwise excluded audiences. This was recognized in November 2008 by being awarded the prestigious Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland award.

He has collaborated with many of the most exciting composers writing today, including Martin Suckling, Patrick Nunn, Monica Max West, Artem Vassiliev, Milton Mermikides, Joby Talbot, Howard Goodall, Richard Sisson, John Metcalfe, Max Richter, Philip Sheppard, Thomas Hewitt Jones, Nigel Morgan and Jenny Olivia Johnston.

Peter was the cellist on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s revolutionary HyperBow project, a part of Tod Machover’s HyperInstrument group, for which he recorded a CD/DVD of new works. During 2009, he will be participating on Stanford’s SoundWIRE project with the CCRMA lab.

During February and March 2008, he was in residence at the Banff Centre in Canada recording his debut award winning CD, SPEM. Featuring five new works alongside the first solo cello recording of Thomas Tallis’s 40 part motet, Spem in Alium, the CD was released at a sell-out showcase concert at Greyfriars Kirk, and was simultaneously broadcast online to an audience across the world. Peter will be touring the SPEM programme as part of the Eclipse Master Class series in America.

 Peter is currently collaborating with London based digital communications agencyOutside Line to create a series of concerts called The Words on The Wall, which focus on new ways to engage the audience by using new tools and spaces. The first of these critically acclaimed events, which encouraged SMS, Twitter and Flickr integration from the audience, was presented in January 2009, with a further four planned for the coming season. He performed at the international charity event, theTwestival in February 2009. 

Peter Gregson is a co-founder of the cutting-edge production company Coffeeloop, plays a 1987 Colin Irving acoustic cello and a blue five string electric cello made for him by Eric Jensen in Seattle. He uses Apple technologies and Eclipse Speakers.

Peter’s clean and well designed blog is powered by Wordpress and uses an Upstart Blogger Wordpress theme. In addition to his blog Peter also uses Flickr effectively, uploading photographs of interest, both to musicians, and the wider public, to maximize his social media presence. A solid and easily recognisable domain name ensures that his blog is easy to find, with or without assistance from Google. Read Peter’s blog at petergregson.co.uk.

This entry was written by Ashley Morgan, posted on February 18, 2009 at 2:03 pm, filed under Musicians and tagged Apple, Artem Vassiliev, Cello, Coffeeloop, Colin Irving, Eclipse, Eric Jensen, Howard Goodall, Jenny Olivia Johnston, Joby Talbot, John Metcalfe, Martin Suckling, Max Richter, Milton Mermikides, Monica Max West, Nigel Morgan, Patrick Nunn, Peter Gregson, Philip Sheppard, Richard Sisson, Thomas Hewitt Jones, Upstart Blogger. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.

Melita Ivkovic of The Zagreb Guitar Quartet is a wonderful example of how musicians are leveraging the power of the blogging and social media. Melita’s detailed submission email explains many of their online methods.

I use Last.fm rss feed to display our upcoming concerts on our website, and use tools to feed my website posts (through RSS) to Facebook page, Last.fm page and Twitter. Also, I link Quartet Last.fm events to Flickr photos from the same events (via machine tags). On the website we have music player with an xml playlist that streams our free tracks from last.fm. On the Recordings page, I embedded our CD from the bandcamp.com site where our fans can stream and buy our music, etc etc… Possibilities are endless. That is why I am sad to see most of the musicians still have 1997-style websites with 30-seconds Real Audio clips, no RSS, no interaction, just ugly dead-end parts of the web.

Clearly, Melita is a musician who understands the internet and the vast potential power of blogging. Guitar4.com, the Wordpress powered blog of The Zagreb Guitar Quartet, is clean and professional, allowing easy access to the quartet’s releases, press information, photographs and biography, which reads as follows.

The Zagreb Guitar Quartet was founded in 1990 by Ante Cagalj, one of the leading guitar teachers in Croatia. Cagalj assembled the Quartet from his students and he is still the ensemble’s artistic director. The Quartet’s current members are Tomislav Vasilj, Krunoslav Pehar, Melita Ivkovic and Mak Grgic.

This experienced ensemble of young musicians has given a multitude of concerts in Croatia and in other countries, from Canada to India, from Russia to South Africa – including appearances at the Austrian Parliament in Vienna, Pontificio instituto di musica sacra in Rome, Les Invalides in Paris, Palazzo Pitti in Florence, Kamani Auditorium in New Delhi, Amici del Loggione del Teatro alla Scala in Milan and Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. It has successfully appeared at several prestigious international competitions, winning first prize at Trofeo Kawai in Tortona, Italy (1996) and at Simone Salmaso in Viareggio, Italy (1998), as well as the Grand Prix at the Ghitaralia Festival Competition in Przemysl, Poland (1998, when Zbigniew Dubiella wrote in Swiat Gitary: For more than few years I haven’t heard something so exciting - after their performance, all that one could do was to get out and scream: Viva guitarra!). At the Varaždin Baroque Evenings in 1998, the Quartet won the Ivan Lukacic Award for the best performance of the festival.

Two years later at this same festival, the Quartet treated the audience to the world premiere of Bach’s The Art of the Fugue arranged for four guitars, receiving rave reviews from Colin Cooper, the editor of the well-known magazine Classical Guitar: it was one of the most extraordinary and vivid experiences including the guitar I can remember.

The Quartet has mastered a huge repertoire ranging from Renaissance and Baroque masters to contemporary composers. It is not afraid to make excursions into jazz and other music, and has made brilliant arrangements of traditional compositions from the Croatian coast and mainland. The Zagreb Guitar Quartet members are also distinguished by the special attention they pay to living Croatian composers amongst whom Željko Brkanovic, Miroslav Miletic, Andelko Klobucar, Vlado Sunko, Adalbert Markovic, Sanda Majurec, Tomislav Uhlik, Ivo Josipovic, Krešimir Seletkovic and Ivan Josip Skender have all dedicated original works to this artistically inquisitive ensemble.

Visit The Zagreb Guitar Quartet at guitar4.com.

This entry was written by Ashley Morgan, posted on February 11, 2009 at 12:09 pm, filed under Musicians and tagged Ante Cagalj, Classical, Croatia, Guitar, Krunoslav Pehar, Mak Grgic, Melita Ivkovic, The Zagreb Guitar Quartet, Tomislav Vasilj. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.

This blog started out as an idea over two years ago but soon got left behind as other projects rose to the top of my agenda. But now, at long last, Musicians Who Blog has launched. The aim of this blog is to highlight, perhaps unsurprisingly, musicians who blog. That might seem easy to the uninitiated but, in reality, it’s a little harder. Musicians Who Blog will seek to help promote real musicians, the ones who get their hands dirty online and write their own blogs, whilst at the same time pointing the finger at all the fake bloggers, the ones who hide behind faceless corporations and let the men in the grey suits do the talking for them.

Furthermore, Musicians Who Blog will seek to promote, by way of example and case study, positive use of blogs and online marketing in the music industry. It is hoped that this blog will become a useful resource for both musicians and music lovers alike.

As introductory explanations go this one has been pretty simple. Hopefully the whole concept of a blog like this is perfectly self explanatory. All that remains is for me to open the email gates and invite blog submissions from any musicians who maintain a blog. To submit your blog simply email me on ashley@ashleymorgan.com. Please include a high resolution photograph if possible.

This entry was written by Ashley Morgan, posted on February 5, 2009 at 3:16 pm, filed under News and tagged Ashley Morgan, Introduction, Upstart Blogger. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.