Alicia Grant

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Biography

Current project: new piano work for American pianist Guy Livingston to be recorded on DVD

Sydney-born Alicia Grant holds a LRAM and first-class BMus(Hons) degree from the Royal Academy of Music, University of London where she studied composition with Simon Bainbridge, Christopher Brown, and Melanie Daiken. Whilst at the RAM, she won numerous scholarships and prizes including the Charles Lucas prize, William Elkin prize, and the Arthur Hinton Memorial prize for composition. Having received an ORS Award and a Clarendon Fund scholarship from the University of Oxford, she is currently studying at Worcester College with Dr Robert Saxton for the DPhil in composition and analysis. In 2004 she was the recipient of the John Lowell Osgood Memorial prize for composition at Oxford.

Her works have been performed by renowned orchestras and ensembles, including the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Choir of Westminster Abbey, the BBC Singers, New College Choir, the Oxford Philomusica, the New Cambridge Singers, and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Major public performances of her works have spanned a great variety of prestigious venues in the UK and Australia, and across the globe in Argentina, the Netherlands and the USA. A sample of these include the Opera House Concert Hall and Entertainment Centre in Sydney, the Federation Concert Hall in Hobart, the Iwaki Auditorium in Melbourne, the Sheldonian Theatre and Holywell Music Room in Oxford, and the Royal Geographical Society, British Music Information Centre, Westminster Abbey, The Warehouse, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Australia House and St John’s Smith Square in London. Her work for solo piano Cross Currents was given its world premiere this May in Carnegie Hall, New York by the Greek pianist, Panos Karan.

Alongside her performances, many of her compositions have been broadcast on radio, in particular for Australia’s ABC Classic FM. Her compositions have also featured in festivals such as the Bath International Music Festival, the Pärt Festival and the Kagel Festival at the RAM. She has been involved in education projects with COMA and the London Sinfonietta and has had her work performed in workshops run by the BBC Singers, the London Sinfonietta, and the National Theatre. Many of her works have been showcased in concerts given by Oxford ensembles such as Ensemble Isis and the Oxford University Sinfonietta.

In 2005, her specially commissioned work ANZAC Anthem, for choir and organ, was premiered by The Choir of Westminster Abbey in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh to mark the 90th Anniversary of the Gallipoli Landings in 1915. In May 2006, her work for wind octet Figure of 8 was premiered by the Oxford Philomusica wind ensemble at a private concert held at the London home of Lady Marks. Another work, Becoming for symphony orchestra and large girls’ choir, was commissioned to celebrate the opening of the Gillian Moore Performing Arts Centre, officially opened by the Governor of New South Wales in a series of concerts at Pymble Ladies’ College, Sydney.