After months of planning, we are delighted to reveal the launch of a new project: a commission by the Music department for a new piece to be performed next year, as part of the University of Kent’s fiftieth-anniversary celebrations.
Part of the year-long events will be to celebrate the achievements of members of the University community, and it seemed therefore fitting to approach composer Matthew King, one of our visiting members of staff here in the music department on the Canterbury campus; Matthew is also a Professor of Composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. The text will be by poet Patricia Debney, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of English.
In searching for a theme for the project, it seemed appropriate to look beyond the University community to the surrounding county of Kent, its landscape and its history, and to the wonderfully atmospheric photographs of Phil Ward, who is also Deputy Director of Research Services here at Kent.
The piece represents the intersection of music, poetry and photography, and will be an excitingly creative way of celebrating the University, its community and its place in the surrounding landscape. You can find out more about the people behind the project here.Follow the project on its blog, Iterating Kent, from inception to final realisation in the summer of 2015, and on Twitter @IteratingKent. We’ll be mapping the gradual unfolding of the project, its ideas and inspiration, and its delivery next year.
The boundary-trashing Icebreaker Ensemble will be here on 
Born in 1947, Paul Patterson was a pupil of Elisabeth Lutyens and Richard Rodney Bennett. He is currently Manson Professor of Composition at the Royal Acadmey of Music. Major compositions include his Mass of the Sea (1983), Stabat Mater (1986), Te Deum (1988), Magnificat (1993), Hell’s Angels (1998) and the Millennium Mass (2000).
It was a wonderful opportunity for the students to work with someone of Paul’s calibre. A major figure on the British music landscape, the chance to work with him was a great privilege. Paul leads a hectic life following his music being performed all over the world (he was recently in Holland attending a concert combining his Magnificat with works by Eric Whitacre, and is shortly off to Denmark), and we are tremendously grateful that he found the time to come to the concert, and to be a part of the rehearsal earlier in the day.
