About COMA

COMA (Contemporary Music-making for Amateurs) promotes participation, for musicians of all abilities, in contemporary music. As part of this commitment, COMA commissions works from leading UK and international composers, works which are artistically challenging and suited to the technical abilities of amateur ensembles.

COMA London Ensemble is one of COMA’s thirteen regional ensembles in the UK. The ensemble has premiered numerous works and performed in Festivals across the country as well as many London venues, including five consecutive years in the Spitalfields Festival. A number of its members are composers, and concert performances commonly include their works.

10 December MT Session

Musician Biographies

Gregory Rose, Music Director, COMA London

Born in 1948, Gregory Rose has worked as an orchestral, operatic, and choral conductor in Eastern and Western Europe, and the Far East; he is experienced in both professional and amateur areas, and is Music Director of COMA London Ensemble. He studied violin & piano from early age, and specialises in contemporary and romantic repertoires. He is Professor of Conducting at Trinity College of Music.

Michael Nyman In C Interlude

Born in 1944, Michael Nyman studied piano, harpsichord and music history with Alan Bush at the Royal Academy of Music, and musicology with Thurston Dart at King’s College, London. Between 1968 and 1978 he worked as a music critic and in 1977 he founded the Campiello Band, later renamed The Michael Nyman Band. Many of his film scores were composed for the films of Peter Greenaway. He has also written several operas, ballet music and a large number of chamber and concert pieces.

In C Interlude is a work inspired by Terry Riley's famous ground breaking open score composition, "In C", written in 1964. In his new work Nyman harnesses some of the '60s pulse like energy along with ideas he explored in earlier works like "In Re: Don Giovanni" to create a unique, open ended, open scored, 80 bar show stopper.

Howard Jones The Illusion of Progress

Born in 1948, Howard studied horn, piano and composition at Birmingham School of Music and Cambridge, and is a recent convert to the double-bass. His commissions include works for Tunbridge Wells Symphony Orchestra, Cheshire Youth Brass Band and Westminster Philharmonic. Howard has been associated with COMA since its first summer School in 1993.

The Illusion of Progress was inspired by M C Escher’s drawing ‘Ascending and Descending’. The drawing depicts an imaginary building which looks realistic but is impossible to construct. At the top of the building is a four-sided gallery in the form of a never-ending spiral staircase, around which a number of hooded figures are endlessly ascending and descending.

Philip Venables Dutch Courage

Philip Venables (b.1979) studied at Jesus College, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Music, where he was awarded the prestigious DipRAM diploma and the Manson Fellowship in Composition. Recent highlights include commissions for the BBC Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Cheltenham Festival 2005, Ballet Rambert and the Korros Trio, the London Sinfonietta, the Spitalfields Festival and the Quantum Loop 2004 Film Festival. His String Quartet is on the SPNM Shortlist for 2004–2007.

Dutch Courage takes its influences from Louis Andreissen’s Workers’ Union using approximate pitch notation and a completely open instrumentation. The harmony, therefore, is always different, and results in ‘improvised’ cluster chords. The chance harmony is compensated by extremely precise, high-energy rhythm, involving a lot of syncopation, some wild, rushing solo lines and rapidly switching dynamics.

Naomi Pinnock Four Humours

Born in 1979, Naomi studied with Harrison Birtwistle at King’s College London, and completed a postgraduate degree at the Royal Academy of Music, where she won the Alan Bush Prize for Obstinare and the Howard Carr Memorial Prize. Over the past three years, her music has been widely performed. Future plans include a new work for the Vigani Cabinet, an ensemble piece for cymbalum, marimba, steel drum and accordion and a music theatre work in collaboration with poet Bill Herbert.

The Four Humours are distinct miniatures that can be played in any order. Choleric is intense and fiery. The ensemble is split into two and pitted against one another. Similarly, Sanguine uses opposing forces but instead they come together at the end. Phlegmatic uses heavy sighs and lazy phrases. Melancholia has repetition with little change. While the piano continuously repeats the same phrase, the ensemble creates a languorously shifting background and a solo line wistfully repeats motifs.