About
DAVID PENRI-EVANS
Penri-Evans has many commissions to his name and his music has been performed across Europe and North America.
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He has appeared as guest composer at the Louisiana Festival of Contemporary Music and at the Conservatoire National de Region de Rouen. He has been a judge for the Ivor Novello Awards and the British Composer Awards for many years.
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He was born in Wrexham, Wales and his Welsh heritage is an important element in his music. Both his Brass Quintet-Ynys Môn and String Quartet-Dinas Brân have Welsh locations as their points of origin (Anglesey and Llangollen respectively) and in each there is a sense of rugged bleakness. Even later works such as Six Pieces for Offa have a mystic atmosphere (Offa's Dyke runs near his childhood home). American composer Ned Rorem said of David's Poem of Youth that his music sounds like New Orleans Jazz heard through a celtic mist.
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Jazz has not directly influenced Penri-Evans' music, yet often in his harmonic language you get the feeling that you are only a step away from the Blues. Indeed, the mood of the Blues and a sense of isolation pervades much of his music.
David studied composition in Louisiana at Centenary College and Louisiana State University, under Dinos Constantinides and was awarded a doctorate in Music in 1986. Constantinides' rigorous approach to composition and the professional life of a composer struck a sympathetic chord. Penri-Evans' music is always clearly structured and listening to it, one feels that the composer knows exactly what he is doing. America proved a fertile soil for his composing. There he produced a large number of works including a symphony and a one-act opera, Study in Grey.
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Teaching has always been an integral part of Dr Penri-Evans' musical life and his teaching career has been extensive in Britain and the US, and culminated as a Senior Lecturer at the Academy of Contemporary Music, Guildford, England. Many of his students have gone on to be professional musicians; composers, performers and even Rock stars such as You Me at Six.
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