David Ward’s music has been commissioned by, amongst others, the BBC, London Festival Orchestra, Edinburgh Quartet, Bingham String Quartet, Saltire Quartet, Shetland Arts Trust, Woodend Music Society, Woodend Arts, Ross Pople, Michael Beeston, Shinobu Miki, Nigel Boddice and Richard Stilgoe, with funds from the Arts Council of GB, the Scottish Arts Council, Creative Scotland, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the National Lottery as well as sponsors, subscribers and trust funds. David has also received direct grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Scottish Arts Council and Enterprise North East as well as from the Hope-Scott Trust, John Younger Trust and other trusts and foundations.
David Ward’s music has been commissioned by, amongst others, the BBC, London Festival Orchestra, Edinburgh Quartet, Bingham String Quartet, Saltire Quartet, Shetland Arts Trust, Woodend Music Society, Woodend Arts, Ross Pople, Michael Beeston, Shinobu Miki, Nigel Boddice and Richard Stilgoe, with funds from the Arts Council of GB, the Scottish Arts Council, Creative Scotland, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the National Lottery as well as sponsors, subscribers and trust funds. David has also received direct grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Scottish Arts Council and Enterprise North East as well as from the Hope-Scott Trust, John Younger Trust and other trusts and foundations.
In 2007 David received a commission from the Institute of Evolutionary Studies to write a piece for 23 solo strings (the same line-up as Strauss’s Metamorphosen) in celebration of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary Metamorphoses was commissioned to celebrate the Theory of Evolution and to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth in 1809 of Charles Darwin.
The composition of Evolutionary Metamorphoses came about as a result of a conversation he was having with a group of people at the University of Glasgow. They were bemoaning the fact that there were so many pieces of music being written in praise of God (MacMillan, Tavener, Pärt etc); but it seemed there were none being written in praise of Evolution.
In 2010 David was commissioned to write a piece which has the title e-mails from Palestine (1) and had its first performance at Woodend Barn, Banchory, Scotland on Friday 12th November 2010 as part of sound, North East Scotland’s festival of new music. The performers were the wonderfully versatile Emily White on trombone, alto sackbut and violin, as well as singing and rhythmic recitation, together with Steve Bingham on violin, five string electric violin and electric bass violin. Both also played some percussion. The words for Emily to sing and recite during this 25 minute quasi-theatrical piece were phrases from the often harrowing, but occasionally humorous e-mails which the Scottish artist Jane Frere had sent to him from Palestine, from the occupied territories and from Palestinian refugee camps across the region, especially while she was putting together her Return of the Soul exhibition in 2007 and 2008. The last part of the piece has a pre-recording of Jane herself reading her recent thoughts on the separation wall. The music followed the opening of her exhibition In the Shadow of the Wall. There were two performances, with different endings, separated by a long interval in which the audience had a discussion with Jane Frere, Emily White, Steve Bingham and David Ward. A more recent performance of this piece took place in a concert on Friday 13th May 2011 at St Giles Church, Cambridge. Soprano Deborah Fink joined Emily and Steve to perform the vocals, with Emily and Steve playing the same instruments as before. Jane Frere provided a sequence of projections to accompany her recorded voice in the final section of the piece.
A studio recording of the piece is planned, to be followed by further performances. e-mails from Palestine (1) was commissioned by Woodend Arts Association with support from Creative Scotland.
This is a brilliant piece. I found it effective, engaging and it’s all accessible! – writes Anthony Sayer, cellist and longest serving member of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, on listening to a recording of the first performance of e-mails from Palestine (1).
In August 2012 David finished writing a new opera, this time based on the Cupid and Psyche myth, with a libretto written for him in 1985 by Kevin Ireland. New Zealand poet Kevin also wrote the libretto for The Snow Queen, which was commissioned by the BBC in 1982.
Cupid and Psyche is a large chamber opera lasting 90 minutes for 6 singers and 23 instrumentalists (plus dancers ad lib.).
David’s short (7 minute) Duo for Violin and Cello had its first performance on 2nd April 2013 at the Tin Hut, Huntly as part of a concert celebrating the 100th aniversary of the birth of Huntly based composer and teacher Ronald Center (1913-1973) who taught broadcaster James Naughtie the piano and encouraged his enthusiasm for opera and string quartets. As well as Ronald Center’s own duet for violin and cello, the programme featured the first performances of seven strikingly varied short pieces that had been specially written for the Ronald Center 100th anniversary concert by young people from six different countries. The performers High Heels and Horse Hair also played the exhilaratingly virtuosic duo by Kodály, a piece by William Gilmour a music teacher at Culloden Academy, Inverness-shire and the new piece by David.
This Duo for Violin and Cello is an adaptation and reworking of music originally written for the clarinet and violin duet of Shinobu Miki and Hector Scott as two separate pieces, Little Duet (2001) and More for H & S (2004). After hearing Little Duet, Michael Tumelty wrote in the Glasgow Herald: Ward’s spacious and emotional piece was like a glimpse into a private world of exchanged intimacies.
The group FourSight has recorded David’s short piece Dreaming of a Distant Love, which he describes as a miniature paraphrase of music from his opera Cupid and Psyche. This is to be released as part of a compilation of two minute pieces by various composers specially written for the group.