Nigel Osborne


Emeritus Professor Nigel Osborne MBE is a British composer, teacher and aid worker. He served as Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh and has also taught at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. He is known for his extensive charity work supporting war traumatised children using Music Therapy techniques, especially in the Balkans during the disastrous Bosnian War, and in the current Syrian conflict. He speaks eight languages.
Osborne was born in Manchester, England, to a Scottish family. He studied composition with Kenneth Leighton, Egon Wellesz, and Witold Rudziński. His compositions include the opera The Electrification of the Soviet Union, Concerto for Flute and Chamber Orchestra commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia, I am Goya, Remembering Esenin, and Birth of the Beatles Symphony.
Osborne retired from his Edinburgh University position in 2012, and is now working internationally as freelance composer, arranger and aid worker.

Career

Nigel Osborne studied composition with Egon Wellesz, the first pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, also with Kenneth Leighton at Oxford University, and later in Warsaw with Witold Rudzinski where he also he worked in the Polish Radio Experimental Studio. From 1983-1985 while at the IRCAM in Paris, he co-founded Contemporary Music Review with Tod Machover. He held a lectureship and Special Professorship at the University of Nottingham from 1978 to 1987, the Reid Chair and Dean of the Faculty of Music at Edinburgh University from 1989 to 2012, a Senior Professorship at the University of Hannover from 1996–98 and Head of Faculty for the Vienna-Prague-Budapest Summer Academy from 2007-2014. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University, visiting Professor in the Drama Faculty of Rijeka University and Consultant to the Chinese Music Institute, Peking University. He has worked as visiting lecturer and examiner also at Harvard, UCLA, CalArts, Gedai and Toho Gakuen School of Music, Oxford, the Sorbonne and Bologna.
Osborne's works have been performed around the world by major orchestras and opera houses, including the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Leningrad Philharmonic, the Philharmonia of London, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Symphony, Glyndebourne, Opera Circus, Opera Factory, Scottish Opera and the Royal Opera House. He has received, among numerous awards, a Netherlands Gaudeamus prize, the Opera Prize of the Radio Sussie Romande and Ville de Geneve, and the Koussevitzky Award of the Library of Congress Washington. He also composes for theatre and film and has a “secret history” of work in popular music and rock ’n roll - he plays in a heavy metal band with his son Ruaraidh.
In the 1980s, Osborne composed a series of "classic works" for choreographer Richard Alston and Ballet Rambert. He has been Master of Music at the Shakespeare's Globe, and is currently “house composer” for Ulysses Theatre, Istria. He has collaborated with notable directors Lenka Udovicki, Peter Sellars, David Pountney, Michael McCarthy and David Freeman, with notable writers Samuel Beckett, Craig Raine, Eve Ensler, Jo Shapcott, Howard Barker, Ariel Dorfman, Tena Stivicic and Goran Simić, with notable actors Vanessa Redgrave, Annette Bening, Lynn Redgrave, Amanda Plummer, Rade Serbedzija, Simon Callow, Ian McDiarmid and Janet Henfrey, and with notable artists and designers John Hoyland, Dick Smith, George Tsypin, David Roger, Bjanka Adzic Ursulov and Peter Mumford. Singers and soloists include pioneers of contemporary music, such as Jane Manning, Linda Hirst, Liz Lawrence and Omar Ebrahim, and long-standing collaborations with artists Florian Kitt, Ernst Kovacic and the Hebrides Ensemble. His film documentary credits include BAFTA-winning and -nominated collaborations with Director Samir Mehanović, an EMMY-winning collaboration with the BBC, and multi-award- winning films with Helen Doyle and InformAction, Montreal. He is currently working with Ken Bowser, producer and director for Saturday Night Live on a documentary film. He has a special interest in Arabic, Indian and Chinese music.
Osborne has pioneered methods of using music and the creative arts to support children who are victims of conflict. This approach was developed during the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and since then this work has been implemented widely in the Balkan region, the Caucasus', the Middle East, East Africa, South East Asia and India. He was also awarded the Freedom Prize of the Peace Institute, Sarajevo, for his work for Bosnian children during the siege of the city. He has worked actively in many human rights initiatives, including the Workers' Defence Committee in Poland, Citizens’ Forum and the Jazz Section with Václav Havel in former Czechoslovakia, for Syrian refugee support organisations and directly for the Government of Bosnia-Herzegovina during the genocide. In 2012-14, Osborne served as co-Chair of the Global Agenda Committee for Arts in Society for the World Economic Forum.
In 2004 he began a long term artistic relationship with Tina Ellen Lee of Opera Circus, a chamber opera and music theatre company now based in West Dorset UK. Together they developed and produced the Bosnian Sevdah Opera Differences in Demolitions https://vimeo.com/40072619 with Bosnian poet Goran Simic and Scottish conductor William Conway. They toured through BiH in 2017 and in 2010 performed this first ever live opera in Srebrenica before heading for Vienna and the Hofburg.
Osborne has been active in supporting the development of new music technologies, for example the Skoog,, and is co-inventor with Paul Robertson of X-System, an informatic modelling of the musical brain capable of predicting emotional response to music of any culture, designed for both medical and leisure applications. He is currently a field worker for SAWA for Development and Aid in Lebanon. In December 2017 he received the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors' Award for Inspiration. He continues to work in special education development in Scotland, Sweden, Croatia and India. He was awarded both the Queen’s Prize and Music Industry Prize for innovation in education, and was recently made Honorary Fellow of the Educational Institute of Scotland. He is a Director of the Scottish educational development company, Tapestry Partnership.
In 2017, Osborne was commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra to arrange Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the ‘It Was Fifty Years Ago Today’ concerts with the Bootleg Beatles performed to capacity crowds at the Royal Albert Hall and Echo Arena Liverpool.
In recent months, Osborne has been working on an opera/film with Ulysses Theatre and Paradiso Films on the Cambridge Spies, a musical/ecological work for Khazanah, Kuala Lumpur, a cantata based on the experiences of refugees for CoMA. He is currently working on a joint composition with Peter Nelson and Owen Underhill for the Cambridge Music Festival, Fringe Percussion and choreographer Henry Daniel in Vancouver, and helping prepare a CD of his works to be recorded as a celebration of his 70th birthday by the Hebrides Ensemble for Delphian Records. In August 2018, Osborne will be the Keynote Speaker at the Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music. He is also assisting citizens of Matera in Basilicata, Italy, in the creation of a community opera alongside Opera Circus to be performed in its year as European City of Culture. The librettist is the Italian Somali poet Ubah Cristina Ali Farah and director James Bonas.
A number of years ago, Nigel approached is colleague of many years, the Chilean/US poet and writer Ariel Dorfman, to work on a new opera with Opera Circus. This became Naciketa, a story devised from the Brahmin spiritual stories, the Upanishads. After many years of work in progress and trying various ways of producing this beautiful new work, it will now tour in May 2021. Full details soon on the Opera Circus web site. https://www.operacircusuk.com/naciketa.html

Publications

Recent scientific and scholarly publications

[University of York Music Press]

Nigel Osborne House composer
Catalogue of works > Komponisten und Werke > Nigel_Osborne > Werkliste

Osborne performing Balkan dances and
Paul McCartney’s Yesterday, along with
his Adagio, with Vedran Smailović,
'The Cellist of Sarajevo’, on the
front line, in the ruins of Skenderija,
during the Siege of Sarajevo, 1993.

Reviews by Nigel Osborne:
The Bacchae
Shakespeare - variations on a Midsummer Night’s Dream
Antigone, 2000 years later
Shakespeare in the Kremlin
Naciketa
The Return
Arturo Ui
The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet 1968
Drunken Night 1918
Differences in Demolition
Hamlet
Core Sample
The Piano Tuner
The Good Body
Marat Sade
Medea
King Lear
The Tempest
Evropa
Sarajevo
Terrible Mouth
Morte d’Arthur
Stone Garden
Faust parts I and II
The Electrification of the Soviet Union
Zansa
Hell’s Angels
Mythologies
Wildlife
Apollo Distraught
7 Words
The Backroom Boys
An Exhibition of Ourselves
Cinderella
Happy Haven

Education

, BMus, DLitt, FRCM, FEIS, FRSE

Awards