Michael has been honoured with the Welsh Music Guild’s most prestigious John Edwards Memorial Award for 2020. During his career Michael co-founded and, for more than 25 years, was joint Artistic Director of the highly successful Music Theatre Wales. He has conducted the works of over 100 living composers and more than 40 opera productions. He received an Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales Award in 2010 and an MBE for services to music in Wales in 2016. In 2017 Michael founded UPROAR: Wales New Music Ensemble - Wales only professional ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. Since their inaugural concert in October 2018 with 10x10, UPROAR has rapidly established itself as a vital force for the development of contemporary music in Wales, having already premiered 16 new works by Welsh composers. UROAR will premiere a further 3 new works by Welsh composers in Professor Bad Trip at Chapter Arts Centre on 28 February. UPROAR ‘s tour of Professor Bad Trip will visit Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Bristol and Montpellier, France involving exciting electroacoustic music from both new Welsh composers – Sarah Lianne Lewis, Bethan Morgan-Williams and Andrew Lewis and established and highly regarded international composers – Tristan Murail, Fausto Romitelli and Kaija Saariaho. Welsh Music Guild

Where are you from/based? I grew up in mid-Wales, not far from Newtown, where I’ve also recently returned to to live. What interested you in this kind of music? One of the best things about being a composer is that no two projects are the same. I haven't had the opportunity to write for large ensemble and electronics before, so I knew the process of doing so would have a lot to teach me. As a composer, I cannot avoid trying to predict how listeners might respond to my music. But the more I learn about psychological time, the more I realise how little control I have, and can ever hope to have, over how others respond to my music. The composition of Devil’s Elbow saw me relinquish control over several parameters. Instead of determining the durations of notes, phrases and sections using intuition, I allowed all of these values to be established according to a text. Even the pitch content was established using this same text (though timbral decisions were made using freedom of choice). The use of the text unites the time of things (the ensemble) and the time of consciousness (the electronics) and together, they constitute a musical time that transverses dimensions. Music’s dependence on temporal succession relates it to human self-consciousness, and even nonlinear forms rely on the listener’s ability to comprehend musical gestures in relation to an underlying (pre-conceived) linearity. Contrasts between sections may be so extreme that they lose all context; but the listener will apply their own context and meaning, and draw their own connections. Devil’s Elbow is an open book in this regard. The text has very little (comprehensible) meaning and virtually no structural identity, so there really are no composed connections from one passage to the next. What has been your inspiration for this new commission? Devil’s Elbow is a reaction to a recent personal experience, with the composition process having allowed the composer to process some of the hurt and anguish that resulted. The piece explores themes of love and violence; creation and destruction; unification and separation; and temptation. It uses language as the basis for generating both the pitch and rhythmical content, and aims to communicate an overriding impression of being torn as a consequence of the incompatibility of two paths. It is not kind – nor is it ambiguous – but, it is somewhat farcical and sometimes even playful. What's been the biggest challenge to creating this new piece? In what is increasingly a perfectionist society, there is a huge amount of relief to be found in the idea that one cannot control ones fate. Most of us are constantly preoccupied with ‘what’s next’, but to occupy our minds with ‘what’s now’ provides a much better platform for ‘what is’. Easier said than done. One of the biggest challenges I faced when writing this piece was separating myself from the text. I wanted to write a piece that’s free of a past, present and future, but the cyclical changes that exist within the text misled me into perceiving a linearity that was persistent in its attempt to make its way into the music. From a technical perspective, imagining how the ensemble would interact with the live electronics (an aleatoric, grain-based sampler) was a tricky thing to navigate. My main consideration was with density levels. I needed to compose the instrumental parts first, since they would then act as a sort of score for the realisation of the electronics, but it was vital that I left enough space. Another time-based problem... if only I could travel into the future to gain a better idea of how these two worlds would communicate! Bethan Morgan-Williams' Devil Elbow, will be performed as part of the Professor Bad Trip programme this Spring.