Amy Crankshaw
List of Works:
Instrumentation: Symphony Orchestra featuring soprano, alto, tenor and baritone saxophones
Duration: 8:16
Programmatic information:
‘Notes from a Wilderness’ is inspired by my detailed account of a hike I did along the Emerald Pool route in the Groendal Wilderness Area, South Africa, many years ago as a 15-year-old scout. At the time, I documented the adventure in my hiking logbook, which I still possess today and which played an integral part in shaping the musical material of the piece. The topographical map of the hiking route informs the overall structure of the work: ascending Ten Stop Hill and traversing the plateau, before descending to Emerald Pools.
Much of my creative process involved finding ways to musicalise my multi-sensory, visceral experiences of the geological features, climate, and vegetation as recorded in my logbook. Additionally, I drew from my embodied memory of the wider area, having hiked through this wilderness many times.
Premier information:
Premiered September 2023 at Barbican Hall, London . Performed by Guildhall Symphony Orchestra. Conducted by Jack Sheen
About the Composer...
Amy Crankshaw is a composer from South Africa, based in London, UK. Her music has been described as having “a real feeling of ecstasy” (Planet Hugill); “carrying images and sensations“ (Ôlyrix); and as “an act of love” (Opera Now). Her compositions are performed internationally, with commissions by Radio France, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, South African Music Rights Organisation, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Ensemble Matters, and performances at Barbican Hall, La Scala Paris, Centre in the Square, Silk Street Theatre, Vorarlberg Museum, Festival Présences, Aix en Juin, Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and Bloomsbury Festival.
Amy has been appointed to the London Symphony Orchestra’s 2023-2024 Soundhub Scheme. She is the winner of the 2023-2024 Richmond Concert Society’s Muriel Dawson Composition Award. Amy was composer-in-residence for the Chamber Music Residency at Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in 2022 and was commissioned by Festival d’Aix-en Provence to co-create a site- specific chamber opera for Aix en Juin in the same year. In 2021, she was commissioned to write a new orchestration of Pauline Viardot’s salon opera Cendrillon for Guildhall School’s 2021 Autumn opera season.
She was composer-in-residence with the London City Orchestra in 2016. She was awarded the 2015 Priaulx Rainier Prize, won second prize in the South African Music Rights Organisation’s Overseas Scholarship Competition for Composers in 2014, and won the South African College of Music’s orchestral composition competition in 2014.
Amy is a Doctoral candidate (DMus composition) at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, with research in how visceral experiences of the natural world can be explored and integrated with composition practices. She is supervised by Julian Philips, Hollie Harding, and Nell Catchpole. She holds an MA in Opera Making and Writing from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and obtained her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in composition from the South African College of Music, where she studied under Hendrik Hofmeyr.
Amy’s piano trio From the Valley of Desolation is featured in Volume 12 (second issue) of The Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, published in December 2015. Over the course of her studies, Amy received several awards for her work including the Myra Chapman Undergraduate Scholarship, the Stephanie Garnett Memorial Prize, the Meyer Levinson Prize and the EE Coutts Memorial Scholarship. Amy is grateful to the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Boltini Trust, the Guildhall School Trust, the South African Music Rights Organisation, and the South African National Research Foundation, whose generous support has made it possible for her to pursue her studies and compose new music.