Carmack Composer Residency: Nigel Osborne at St Catharine's College

Nigel Osborne (b.1948) is a composer and aid worker. He studied with Kenneth Leighton and Egon Wellesz the first pupil of Schoenberg at Oxford (St Edmund Hall) and at the Warsaw Academy and Polish Radio Experimental Studio. His works have been performed by orchestras ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Philharmonia of London and by opera houses from Vienna and Berlin to Glyndebourne. He is former Reid Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor and lecturer at Peking University, Rijeka, UCLA, CalArts, Harvard, Vienna, Kharkiv, Lviv, Odesa, Paris Est and elsewhere. He has received, among other awards, the Opera Prize of Radio Suisse Romande, the Netherlands Gaudeamus Prize, the Koussevitzky Award of the Library of Congress Washington and the Inspiration Award of the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers. He has pioneered the use of music to support children and soldiers with trauma and to treat disorders of the Central Nervous System; for this work he has been awarded the Freedom Prize of the Peace Institute Sarajevo, a Queen’s Prize and the Doubleday Medal of the University of Manchester School of Medical Sciences.

The Carmack Composer Residency has been made possible through the generosity of Elizabeth Carmack, whose organisation – the Cambridge Music Conference – has since 2000 commissioned new music, advocating for the importance of music in healing and social justice. The annual residency will, in its first five years, be hosted at St Catharine’s College.