User:Drew-Batty/sandbox

William Drew-Batty is a British composer, teacher and poet. He was born in Hereford on 11th November 1960. After finishing school he began working for Shell UK before finally deciding to take a university place at The University of East Anglia in 1991, where he studied music with Professor Peter Aston and Dr Denis Smalley. He was awarded the Imogen Holst Scholarship for music performance and later took the MA in music composition at John Ruskin College, Cambridge, where he studied with Dr Alan Bullard. Drew-Batty has written several pieces for mixed ensemble including three operas (The Black Dog - Norwich Festival 1997, Time 2000 and Fools' Gold 2002). He is particularly interested in the union of poetry, sometimes his own, and music and has produced many fine examples of choral music including Biblical texts and work by Kevin Crossley Holland, Rupert Brooke and Terry Waite. His largest work, Songs of Solitude, was the result of a collaboration with Waite in 1997 and is scored for full orchestra, including piano, saxophone quartet, organ, double choir, solo flute, vocal soloists and narrator. The piece was first performed at Norwich Cathedral in April 1997. Drew-Batty has since scaled his work for smaller forces and has worked with author, Victoria Panto Bacon, to produce a piece of music theatre, based on her Grandfather's wartime diary, 'Six Weeks of Blenheim Summer (pub. Penguin). As a poet Drew-Batty published his first collection of poems Night Harvest in 2019 and has composed, Late Closing, a musical setting for actors and synthesiser of his own narrative poem (The Fisher Theatre, Bungay 2020). His most recent work, The World is Upside Down is a poem by Drew-Batty exploring themes of mental health and is scored for piano, solo violin, cello, two actors and choir.