Andrew Glover (composer)


Andrew Glover is an English composer. His music has been played by many national and international performers and ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins and Grant Llewellyn and the English Northern Philharmonia under Paul Daniel, and is mainly performed abroad from Mexico to Russia among other places and artists. He was a visiting Composition Lecturer at the Birmingham Conservatoire until early 2014.

Biography

Glover was born in Birmingham, UK. He studied in Nottingham and gained his Doctorate in 1994 from Keele University after studying with George Nicholson. His composition is influenced by world music and rock. He has won several competitions.
His best-known work is the aggressive work for orchestra "Fractured Vistas" from 1995. Played and broadcast in various countries and shortlisted in the Lutoslawski Prize in 1997.
In 2000 he began working on his concerto The Death of Angels: A Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, based on John Milton's Paradise Lost. This work was premiered and broadcast by the BBC in February 2003.
His 45-minute Piano Concerto took four years to compose between 2002 and 2006 but remains unperformed to date but he has always stated that he feels it is his best work.
After three years research, experimentation with Sound Files and electronic principles and historic research into the Eastern Roman Empire he completed his "Symphony No.2: Byzantium" in 2009 which was released on the CDP label in Britain. Further research and experimentation produced the "Anglo Saxon Trilogy" based on Anglo Saxon culture and language. Both works are for fixed media.
In April 2013 a 50th birthday concert at the Birmingham Conservatoire of Music showcased some of his more recent chamber music to great critical praise.

Musical style

Glover worked as a semi-professional flautist as a student and much of his output features the flute, with several commissioned compositions for the Japanese/Mexican flutist Asako Arai.
Much of Glover's early work dealt with the manipulation of pulse and time. He said in an interview on BBC Radio in 2004 that his fascination in this area came from watching nature's natural rhythms of life change and move at different rates of change, and "the sound of the great earth cracking…". This informed the works in his PhD thesis and culminated in works such as Fractured Vistas and The Fickle Virgin of Seventeen Summers.
This research work lead to his study of the polyrhythmic, micro-macro aleatory works of György Ligeti and Witold Lutosławski. His own work is something of a development of these ideas into a more modern idiom, this is particularly evident in the slow movements of his Violin and Flute Concertos.

Alleged political stance

In November 2008 a database with names of British National Party members was made public by Wikileaks, with Dr Andrew Glover's name, address, phone number, email address and a short biography appearing on the list. Subsequently, in the Daily Mirror, Alun Palmer quoted Glover as saying "I am not particularly open about my involvement in the BNP because people choose to presume we are racists." The then Deputy Chairman of the BNP, Simon Darby, said the source of the leak could be a disgruntled ex-member.
Thereupon, in March 2009, a petition launched by Rose Mitchell, Love Music Hate Racism and Unite Against Fascism sought to have Glover removed from his post as visiting lecturer at Birmingham City University due to his alleged membership. Mitchell said she had been shocked by allegations that Glover was a BNP member. "He teaches students from all over the world. I don't have any evidence that he has behaved in a racist way towards students," she said, adding that the allegation that he was involved in a far-Right party was "very worrying". The effort failed.
Simon Darby said "He is merely a member, or an alleged member, of the BNP and is being driven from his job as a result". The BNP advised those named on the list to deny their membership and said that they would confirm that in writing if required. In a Times Higher Education Supplement interview Glover denied being a current member of the BNP and accused the left wing of a "1950s McCarthy witch-hunt" against him.

Selected compositions