Dr Simone Spagnolo

Simone Spagnolo is a composer, lecturer and academic whose work embraces a wide range of artistic and scholarly activities.

His work is often driven by a profound curiosity for interdisciplinary interactions, within which musical composition interplays and amalgamates with other disciplines, as for instance narrative, theatre, drawing, philosophy, design, detecting and performance art. His compositional style tends to manifests through music-theatre, musical-actions, instrumental theatre, graphic scores, experimental opera and other hybrid forms that often feature unusual instrumental and vocal combinations. His portfolio includes numerous chamber-scale musical theatre spectacles that have received starred reviews, as for instance "Even you, lights, cannot hear me" for two singers doubling on piano and pebbles, and "Faust, Alberta", an operatic monologue for baritone and four instruments.

Spagnolo’s music has been performed in internationally known venues and festivals such as London’s Royal Festival Hall, St.Martin-in-the-Fields, Blackheath Halls, Riverside Studios, Tete-a-Tete Festival, Old Royal Naval College’s Chapel, Italian Cultural Institute London, Cambridge Mumford Theatre, Birmingham Symphony Hall, Stanford University, Los Angeles’ Aratani Theatre, Brno’s Janacek Academy, Budapest’s Liszt Academy, Chongqing University, Hong Kong’s Yuen Long Theatre, Centro de Estudios Públicos in Santiago de Chile, Padua’s Sala dei Giganti, Spoleto’s Casa Menotti, Bolzano Contemporary Music Festival, Salerno’s Dome, Campania Eco Festival and Pennsylvania’s Great Lakes Film Festival, among others.

Having composed music for a variety of settings and contexts – from live concerts to theatre and ballet, from soundtracks to library music – Simone Spagnolo has been commissioned from institutions and companies such as Opera in the City Festival, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Anderson Entertainment, Fabergé LTD, Intervox Music Production, ChinaWest Productions, Lost Picture Production, Dance Ahead and St Augustine Singers. Artists he has collaborated with include musicians Gabriele Baldocci, Timothy Schwarz and Alda Dizdari, conductors Diego Garcia Rodriguez and Paul Jackson, singers Kate SymondsJoy and Ben Bevan, ensembles Mifune Tsuji Trio and Arioso Furioso, playwrights Roberto Cavosi and Giordano Trischitta, directors Luc Mollinger and Ben Samuels, among others.

Spagnolo has also collaborated with numerous harpists, developing a rich repertoire of works for harp and harp ensembles which have been performed internationally by numerous musicians. His composition "Silenzio, for prepared harp" has been performed globally in tens of concerts. It was featured in a dedicated documentary broadcast on "Cultural Plaza", Jade Channel TVB, Hong Kong (2018), it is regularly performed as part of conservatoire’s recitals and exams and it is featured in the Trinity College London’s Syllabus.

Simone Spagnolo has received numerous awards, including the Asia America Symphony Orchestra Composition Prize, in Los Angeles, earning the distinction of being the first winner from outside the United States – an award he received from legendary pianist and producer David Benoit. Other prizes he received include Birmingham Conservatoire’s Philip Bates Prize and Middlesex University’ David Turton Prize. In 2011 he has been appointed as artist-inresidence at Bergen’s USF Verftet, Norway.

Since 2018 he has been Head of Composition at London College of Music, University of West London, where he leads the BMus and MMus composition curricula, as well as numerous knowledge exchange activities including the LCM Composition Festival and the Composers Workshops. Previously, he held the position of Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Performing Arts at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and Lecturer in Music Theatre at University of Cumbria. He has also lectured on creative orchestration for the Conservatoire of Rovigo’s Master in Film Music Composition (Italy).

His academic writings have been published on Studies in Musical Theatre Journal (Intellect Books), Studies in Theatre and Performance and the Institute of Composing Journal, and he has delivered conference papers at University of Oxford’s APGRD, Oxford Brookes University’s OBERTO, London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and Cambridge’s Anglia Ruskin University, among others. Some of his music scores are published by Universal Edition.

Simone Spagnolo’s discography can be found on Spotify, iTunes, and all the main music distributors.

Website

See Dr Simone Spagnolo's publications list in the UWL Repository.