WENDY HISCOCKS, COMPOSER

Please note: this site is no longer maintained.  Please visit Wendy's new site www.wendyhiscocks.com Wendy Hiscocks’s music is imbued with her love of dance and by a natural melodic sense.  While tonally based, her music uses many different scales and modes, savouring the colour and character of the twelve notes of the octave and their varied combinations.  For her, music is to the ears as light to the eyes, and her most recent works explore sound in the same way as many of her favourite painters (from Turner to Lloyd Rees) explore colour and light.

Since moving to London in 1987, Wendy Hiscocks has had works performed and broadcast worldwide, including London's South Bank and Wigmore Hall, BBC and Australian ABC broadcasts, and major Festivals in the UK and elsewhere.  She has been awarded commissions through the Arts Council of England, the Australia Council, and the Schubert Ensemble's Chamber Music 2000 project.  Her music has been premièred, recorded and broadcast by singers Natalia Afeyan, Elizabeth Connell, Vivien Hamilton, Naomi Itami, Camille van Lunen, Rosalind Martin, Rachel Nicholls, Merlyn Quayfe, Sarah Redgwick, Damien Top and Keith Hempton, string soloists Miwako Abe, Carolyn Lam and Matthias Feile, pianists Jeanell Carrigan, Roy Howat, Yvonne Lau, Sally Mays and Cordelia Williams, the chamber groups Triangulus, Ku-ring-gai Virtuosi, English Serenata, the Quatuor Krommer (with clarinettist Thomas Friedli), Quatuor Terpsychordes, the Choir of Jesus College, Cambridge, and the Kallmünz Festivalorchester with conductor Graham Buckland.  The first piece of her children's piano collection Light was selected for the Grade 1 syllabus of the Fédération française des Écoles de Musique, and sold over 1500 copies within two years of publication.  Another piece from the same collection is on the syllabus of the Australian Music Examination, and her piano suite The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is on the AMEB's Licentiate syllabus. Wendy Hiscocks's music mixes her Australian origins with international flavour: she has set Bulgarian poetry in the original language, and her works for young performers embrace folk material from around the world.  Her worldwide interests are reflected in her cantata Libretto of the Eight Year Old (a worldwide journey seen through the eyes of a child), and she has formed a strong link with the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.  Some works also take inspiration from Latvian folk sources.  Most of Wendy Hiscocks's music is available from the Australian Music Centre.  Under the name 'Creativity & Music' she gives composition courses for children in various countries. Wendy's appearances as pianist have included London's South Bank, Festivals and radio broadcasts in the UK, France, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, and on a CD of Chabrier piano music (with Roy Howat) for the French label STIL. The links to audio extracts on the catalogue and programme note pages below are in process of being updated.

Events Page

Reviews of Wendy Hiscocks's Music

Creativity & Music Composition Courses

Publishers

Catalogue:    Songs     Choral Music      Chamber Music      Piano Music      Orchestra The Howat–Hiscocks Piano Duo