Julian Anderson recognised in New Year Honours 2021
Composer in Residence and Professor of Composition awarded CBE for services to music.
Congratulations to Guildhall Composer in Residence and Professor of Composition Julian Anderson, who has been awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours 2021 for his services to music.
Jonathan Vaughan, Vice-Principal and Director of Music at Guildhall, said on the award: “We are delighted and proud to learn that Julian Anderson’s outstanding contributions to composition and the world of music have been recognised in this year’s New Year’s Honours List. Julian’s compositions continue to make a formidable impact in the world and his teaching never fails to attract and inspire new generations of artists and aspiring students of composition from all around the world.”
Julian Anderson is among the most esteemed and influential composers of his generation, with regular performances both internationally and at home in the UK. He was awarded a prestigious RPS Composition Prize in 1992 at the age of 25 for his two movement work Diptych (1990) for orchestra, launching his career.
His success as a composer has also fed a prominent academic career, which has included Senior Composition Professorships at the Royal College of Music, where he was also Head of Composition for 5 years, and Harvard University. He joined Guildhall in 2007 to take up the specially created post of Composer in Residence and Professor of Composition.
In 2017, Guildhall musicians explored Anderson's extraordinary chamber music as part of the BBC’s Total Immersion day, in a performance directed by Richard Baker. A specially programmed one-day conference to mark the composer's 50th birthday also took place, with some of the UK’s leading scholars of contemporary music illuminating Anderson’s music, contexts and inspirations. The conference was presented by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, with kind support from the Music & Letters Trust.
Anderson is also much in demand as concert programmer and public speaker. Between 2002 and 2011 he was Artistic Director of the Phiharmonia’s Music of Today concert series at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and from 2013 to 2016 he was Composer in Residence at Wigmore Hall.