BBC - Singers - Composers

Judith Bingham (Associate Composer)
Judith Bingham was born in Nottingham, grew up in Sheffield and had already been composing actively for many years when she entered the Royal Academy of Music in 1970 to study composition and singing. Her teachers included Alan Bush and Eric Fenby, later Erich Vietheer (for singing) and most potently Hans Keller, with whom she studied privately.

Her individual musical voice soon attracted attention and led to many requests for works, notably for the King's Singers, Peter Pears and the Songmakers' Almanac. In 1977 she won the BBC Young Composer Award and from 1983-96 she was a regular member of the BBC Singers, for whom she has written 8 works, most recently Bach's Tomb, for their 2004 Baltic Tour.

The premiere of Chartres in 1994 led to a succession of major performances and commissions: by the BBC Philharmonic, London Symphony orchestra, King's College Cambridge, the Centenary Proms, Three Choirs Festival, Westminster Abbey and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, who performed The Temple at Karnak 21 times throughout Europe and the US. Judith Bingham is one of the UK's most internationally performed composers: the string trio Chapman's Pool has received over 80 performances globally in just 2 years - astonishing for a contemporary score, and other works have recently been played in Paris, Oslo, St Louis, Copenhagen, Mexico, Tallinn, Rotterdam, and Perth, Australia.

While her orchestral and choral works have made the widest impact, Bingham has won particular acclaim for her scores for brass ensemble, band and solo: in 2003 she was the first woman to have a work ( Prague ) selected as a National Brass Band Championship testpiece. She is also fast becoming recognised as a major composer of organ music. New works include scores for the Goldberg Ensemble, Thomas Trotter, the Royal Ballet, and the 2004 Proms, and her huge orchestral piece Chartres has been selected for the Encore project and will be conducted by James MacMillan in March 2005. She was the 2004 winner of the Barlow Prize for choral music, and won two British Composer awards in the same year for choral and liturgical music.

Click here to read an interview with Judith Bingham, published in the BBC Singers magazine Leading Notes

Click here to read the interview in full

BBC Singers - Composers