Julian Philips

Julian Philips is a Cardiff born composer whose concert, operatic and dance music explores cross-art dialogues, whether with text, movement or image, often with a heightened concern for specific performing, social or cultural contexts.

Julian was Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s first ever Composer-in-Residence, which he pursued as part of an AHRC funded collaborative doctorate with the University of Sussex (2006-10). This resulted in a series of three new operas, including The Yellow Sofa (2009) and his widely acclaimed youth opera, Knight Crew (2010), which featured in a BBC Television documentary. His opera for children, How the Whale Became based on the creation tales of Ted Hughes, was premiered at the Royal Opera House in December 2013.

Since Glyndebourne, Julian has continued to develop his creative practice in opera, notably as part of an AHRC Research Programme, led by the University of Manchester: Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community. Contributing to the programme’s translingual strand exploring how opera communicate meaning beyond language barriers, Julian created The Tale of Januarie (2017), based on Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, with a libretto in Middle English, by Stephen Plaice. The opera was conceived for a specific cohort of postgraduate singers on the Guildhall School’s Opera Course, together with the Guildhall Symphony and Early Music department; its shifting Middle English textures of both French and Anglo-Saxon provoking its audience to consider the nature and function of text in contemporary opera. This was followed by Henny Penny (2020), designed to offer primary school children an immersive experience of both music and modern language learning, through the medium of opera. The work currently exists in French (Coquotte Chocotte), German (Hennig Pfennig) and Spanish (Pollita Chiquita).

Julian’s collaborative partnerships have extended far beyond opera. He has collaborated with choreographers Michael Corder and Mikhael ‘Marso’ Rivière, with directors Michael Grandage, Christopher Luscombe, Olivia Fuchs and Freddie Wake-Walker, and with writers including Berlie Doherty, Nicky Singer, Edward Kemp and Rebecca Hurst. He has enjoyed partnerships with singers Gerald Finley, Dawn Upshaw, Sir Thomas Allen, Roderick Williams and Sally Matthews. His extensive vocal output includes settings of e e cummings, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Langston Hughes, John Clare, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fernando Pessoa.

Julian has produced a substantial body of instrumental music, premiered by performers and orchestras such as Evelyn Glennie, Lawrence Power, the Vertavo Quartet, Britten Sinfonia, members of the Berlin Philharmonic, and the National Orchestra of Belgium.

Julian’s most recent work includes a set of creative transcriptions of traditional melodies collected by poet John Clare, Melodys of Earth and Sky, recently released by NMC Recordings (March 2022). His theatrical concert work, Looking West (2022), explores an ancient Cumbrian pilgrimage route through a mixed texture of spoken word, field recording, song and instrumental music. He has a number of projects in development, building on the experience of making Looking West, which explore both the integration of field recordings, and creative strategies to theatricalise the experience of contemporary concert music.

New opera development, creative dialogues between music and text, exploring community and education contexts for contemporary music and opera, theatricalising the experience of the concert hall, tuning theory and the adoption/partial incorporation of alternative systems, the collection and musical integration of field recordings, creative compositional approaches to the work of poet John Clare.