Composer & Poet
Blue Touch Paper artists
Philip Venables was born in Chester, UK, in 1979. He went to Jesus College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences, but then went on to complete a Masters at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with Philip Cashian, where he was awarded the DipRAM diploma and the Manson Fellowship in Composition, amongst other prizes in composition.
Philip's music has been performed and broadcast internationally. His Piano Studies won first prize in the International Composition Competition ‘From Romanticism to Contemporary” in Bucharest in June 2009. Arc, for the BBC Philharmonic, received a special mention at the 2006 British Academy Composer Awards and was broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He had his Wigmore Hall debut the same year with the premiere of his complete String Quartet by the Duke Quartet. This piece has been performed more than a dozen times by four different quartets and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and ABC Australian radio. In 2006 Philip was asked to write Praecentio, a prelude to Mozart’s Requiem for the Canterbury Cathedral celebrations of Mozart’s 250th Anniversary, performed by Southbank Sinfonia and Nicholas Cleobury.
Currently projects include The Schmürz, his first opera, a commission from Wigmore Hall, a violin concerto, a new work for EXAUDI and Endymion for the Southbank Centre and Sound Scotland, and a new work for the Phoenix Piano Trio. Philip is gathering ideas and collaborators for music & video installation mini-operas.
Click here to view Philip's website
Steven Johannes Fowler is the author of four collections of poetry ,em>Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons press), Fights (Veer books), Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA press) and the Lamb Pit (Eggbox publishing). He has published nine chapbooks, with presses like Oystercatcher, the Red Ceilings and the Arthur Shilling press. He is the poetry editor for 3am magazine and Lyrikline in the United Kingdom. He edits the weekly interview series Maintenant focusing on innovative, contemporary European poets www.maintenant.co.uk
Working across lingual, visual and sound poetry, his work has been published in over 100 journals and magazines including BlazeVox, Sand, Poetry International, the Warwick Review, Chroma and the Poetry Salzburg review. He has been the subject of features in Vice magazine, the Reactor, the North Chicago Review and It's Nice That, and the Guardian online. He has read to audiences across Europe, at festivals in Berlin, Bucharest and Reykjavik as well as the breadth of England, with performances at the Wigmore Hall, Morden Tower, Voewood house, the New Gallery, the Soho Curzon and the Guildhall school of music.
He has received commissions from, amongst others, the Tate Britain and the London Herbarium, and has exhibited his visual and conceptual poetry in galleries in both London and Liverpool. He has collaborated with artists like Drew Millward, Joseph Royce Lewis and Joel Ely, photographers like Edith Bergfors, Lone Eriksen and Katrina D'Autremont, musicians & composers like Chora, Ex-Easter Island head and Wenjing Wang, performance artists like Patrick Coyle and Holly Pester, playwrights like RDG Thomas and Marcus Slease, and poets like Tim Atkins and Sarah Kelly.
He is a full time employee of the British Museum, and having studied philosophy at the University of Durham and the University of London, Birkbeck college, he is now completing his PhD in poetry at the Centre for Contemporary Poetic
Research, University of London.
