Harper

Edward Harper was born in 1941, in Taunton, Somerset. He studied music at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained a first class honours degree, and at the Royal College of Music, London. Subsequently he studied for a further period with Franco Donatoni in Milan. Since 1964 he has been on the staff of the Faculty of Music at Edinburgh University, where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is active as a pianist and conductor and is the Director of the New Music Group of Scotland, an ensemble which has established itself as a significant and highly-valued part of Scottish musical life, as well as giving concerts in London and abroad.

His music has been performed throughout Great Britain and abroad. The chamber opera Fanny Robin has been heard as far afield as America and New Zealand. The Symphony (1979) was written for Sir Alexander Gibson and the Scottish National Orchestra and premièred by them at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh. Seven Poems by e.e. cummings was first performed by Jane Manning and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Glasgow in 1977 and subsequently appeared in the 1978 Henry Wood Promenade concerts. Other important works include the Chester Mass, Harper's first work for choir and orchestra, written for the 1900th anniversary celebrations of the City of Chester in 1979, the Clarinet Concerto, for the 1981 Llandaff Festival, Hedda Gabler (1985), a full length opera for Scottish Opera, and Fantasia V, for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, performed at the 1985 Saint Magnus Festival, Orkney.

From a style owing much to serial and aleatory techniques in the late sixties Harper moved, as have many composers, to a more tonally based style. Bartok Games, 1972, is a key work in this change. Originally written, as was Fanny Robin, for the students at Edinburgh University, these two pieces particularly please the composer in that they work equally well at either an amateur or a professional level. A new opera for the Edinburgh University Opera Club, The Mellstock Quire continued to develop this particular aspect of Harper's output. At present, Edward Harper is concentrating on another opera commissioned by ECAT called The Spire.

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