John Hearne
John Michael Hearne is a Scottish music publisher, composer, conductor and singer.
John Hearne was born Reading, with his parents having came from Wales. Since 1970 he has lived in Scotland. He studied in St Luke’s College, Exeter, and at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth where he gained a First Class Honours degree and a Masters degree. For a time he taught music in Iceland, and for 17 years was a lecturer at Aberdeen College of Education. He was the first Chairman of the Scottish Society of Composers, and was the Chairman of the Scottish Music Advisory Committee of the BBC from 1986 to 1990.
He is now a freelance composer, singer and conductor, and was Chairman of Gordon Forum for the Arts in Aberdeenshire for three years. He was Warden for the Performers and Composers Section of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, and is a former member of the Executive Committee of the Composers’ Guild of Great Britain.
In 1985, John’s suite for Brass and Percussion, The Four Horsemen, was premièred at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was voted the best new work heard on the Fringe that year and the composer received the Festival City Radio Trophy from Radio Forth. This work has since been performed many times by a number of different groups, including the BBC Scottish Brass Ensemble and The Wallace Collection. In January 1998, he was asked to form a new choral society in his local town of Inverurie.
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In July 2003, John was a guest composer at the Victoria International Arts Festival in Gozo, Malta. His choral song The Seagull, based on a folksong from Skye, was featured by the National Youth Choir of Great Britain in their 2003 tour of Australia and Singapore, and was a spectacular success.
John was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music (D.Mus.) from the University of Wales, the first time this degree has been conferred in more than thirty years. The award was based on a portfolio of his compositions. He graduated in Aberystwyth in July 2005.
In November 2010 John won the Caledonian Hilton Audience Prize in the Waverley Trust competition for a new carol. “There’s a Song in the Air was published by OUP in 2011 in ‘Carols for Choirs 5′. For more information go to www.waverleycare.org
In July 2012 John Hearne took members of the Stonehaven Chorus to Iceland for a four-day concert tour, performing in Reykjavík, Stykkishólmur, Reykholt and Borgarnes.
In May 2014 John stepped down as Conductor of the Stonehaven Chorus to become ‘Conductor Emeritus’. He conducted his ‘retiral’ concert in Stonehaven on 11 May in a programme that included the premiere of “Dream Riders”, a new suite of four lyric pieces for chorus and orchestra to poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Steven, Thomas Dekker and E.V. Rieu. The programme also included John’s Icelandic folk-song suite “Summernights in the Fjords” and several a cappella choral pieces, some by contemporary composers that John has introduced to audiences over the past 25 years.
