GRAHAM COATMAN enjoys an active and varied career as composer, musical director and accompanist.
He has special commitment to, and involvement in creative community and education projects. His orchestral
song cycle She Beautie Is, (gaining a RVW Trust award and shown on Scottish TV) and the guitar concerto
Arcana Verba, (winning a prize in the Menuhin Composition Competition) attracted early attention, since
when he has written in all genres, orchestral, choral, large and small scale, but he is especially happy
writing music for the stage and for young people.
Recent theatre works include the chamber opera
Giovanni's Women (commissioned for a 1994 Arts Council tour by Compact Opera, and toured again in 1996)
and several music-theatre works for young people. In 1998 Graham was composer and musical director on
the highly innovative multi-media music-theatre work Travelling Through the Paradise Fields. The 90-minute
score deployed the 200 performers in a promenade performance at a disused mill in Batley, West Yorkshire,
and included soloists, children's chorus, community choir, orchestra, plus ensemble of whistles, industrial
scrap band and recorded soundtrack!
Concert works last year included two commissions for
soprano and organ from Manchester's Bridgewater Hall, the first, But Release Me From My Bands, 3 scenas
after Shakespeare's The Tempest, was acclaimed at its premiere in April 1999; the second is a set of
songs, The Peacock's Pageant, premiered in January 2000. Graham is creating pageant music and a music-theatre
work with director/designer Russell Dean for the Marylebone Millennium Mysteries, based on Moses and
the Plagues from the York Mystery Cycle, for St Marylebone High School, to be performed at the Wigmore
Hall in July 2000.
Graham is a well known and respected deviser and leader of creative community
and education projects, ranging from teachers INSET courses and orchestral player training, through composition
projects in schools and colleges, to work with ethnic groups, community opera and with special needs,
young offenders, theatre, dance and other institutions. Many works spring from this dimension to his
work, such as the children's cantata-musical Songs of the Stones, written as Composer-in-Residence
to the castles of Flintshire in North Wales in autumn 1999. Graham is listed in International Who'sWho
in Music.
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