Composers' Workshop: Martin Suckling

Martin Suckling is a composer and violinist; he is also Deputy Head of the School of Arts and Creative Technologies, Professor of Composition and Head of Music at the University of York. His music has been championed by many leading orchestras and ensembles including the London Sinfonietta, Scottish Ensemble, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

From 2013-18 Suckling was the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Associate Composer, a partnership which resulted in Six Speechless Songs, a concerto for pianist Tom Poster, and Meditation (after Donne) for chamber orchestra and electronics. Suckling also enjoys a close relationship with the Aurora Orchestra, with commissions ranging from Psalm, for harp and spatialised ensembles, premiered at the Royal Academy of Arts as part of Edmund de Waal’s ‘white’ project in 2015 to an adaption of the Barnett / Klassen children’s book The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse in 2023.

This Departing Landscape, commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic, gives its name to a critically acclaimed orchestral portrait disc released by NMC in 2021. these bones, this flesh, this skin, Suckling’s interactive web-based collaboration with Scottish Ensemble and Scottish Dance Theatre received both a Scottish Award for New Music and the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in 2021, leading to the genre-breaking ‘game-for-music’, Black Fell (black-fell.com). A chamber portrait disc, The Tuning, was released by Delphian in January 2022, and was subsequently shortlisted for a Gramophone Award before winning a Scottish Award for New Music in 2023.