Oliver Weeks is a composer, guitarist and arranger who has done loads of different shit.
Oliver recently completed a PhD in composition at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Phil Cashian and Simon
Bainbridge , before that studying composition at Clare College, Cambridge with Robin Holloway , obtaining a double first in the BA music tripos. Recent commissions include pieces for the Philharamonia Orchestra (Headless Butterfly), the Endymion
Ensemble (Nightlight for Alice, composed for the 2005 Maxwell Davies festival), the Royal Academy Soloists (Galliambics) and the 2005 Cheltenham Music Festival (The Panther).
Oliver was born in Gloucester in 1978 and his first compositions were written at the age of six, one of the earliest, a limerick, written for the innovative ensemble of high voice and School Glockenspiel. Soon after, his ambition extended to small pieces for the violin and piano (sometimes for both, occasionally for a strange hybrid of the two), and within the year to the great classical and romantic forms: the concerto (Piano Concerto in G minor, The Night Concerto in A minor for Violin and Orchestra), oratorio (The Wanderings Of ‘Odyseuss’), the tone poem (The Sea, with its moving ‘Battle between a G. Squid and a Sp. Whale’ interlude). He studied violin from the age of 6, piano from the age of 8 and guitar from the age of 10, when he began writing and recording songs and playing in the odd band.
At university he formed Weedmeter
with Sam Swallow and conducted fieldwork on the Baul musicians (mystic poets and singers) of Bengal, writing his dissertation on Baul-gan and Rabindrasangit in Bengal in the 19th century. He continued at Cambridge for another year, completing an MPhil in composition and writing dissertations on Varèse and the relationship between rock and the avant-garde in the late 1960s. Meanwhile, he continued to gig with several bands in London and Cambridge, playing at China White’s, the Cobden Club, the 100 Club, Pop and other such shitholes.
In 2002, after enrolling on the PhD composition course at the Royal Academy of Music, Oliver formed Parapar with Moushumi Bhowmik. In both 2004 and 2005, Parapar toured India and Bangladesh and were enthusiastically received by Indian and Bangladeshi audiences and media, with all concerts sold out in both countries.
Oliver’s arranging work includes transcribing and reconstructing Salieri orchestral works for the City of London Sinfonia and working with The London Sinfonietta and Jonny Greenwood on a performable orchestral score of the Bodysong soundtrack. He also works for Faber Music writing guitar tablature and piano arrangements. He has also contributed violin and string arrangements to Matthew
Rozeik’s How Do I
Find You (on Static Caravan Recordings, 2005) and plays keys and violin for the legendary supergroup Astrohenge .
“Oliver Weeks’s Drumhead Mass was most impressive and extremely effectively performed. It is brief and perfunctory, but extremely rich. Its sound world and tonal reference range from the lightest, briefest snatch from a several-hundred-year-old piece for brass to a section for caressed side drum and a flute breathed into without producing a note. Two terse and exclamatory climaxes had a shattering impact.†Kevin Carter, The Classical Source, June 2005
“Oliver Weeks’s Nightlight for Alice weaves together a snatch of Bellini’s Norma and an old blues number into an increasingly glowering lullaby - strange but effective.†Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 22 April 2005
