Composer

Biography

Having spent twenty years living in Auckland, Richard Bolley is proud to consider himself – at least in part – a New Zealander, although he lives at present in London, England, where he was born in 1951.

To date his compositional life has been rather episodic, with periods of absorption in creativity interspersed with phases during which his life as first an administrator of the arts and then of education has taken over. He is currently in the middle of one of the latter periods, but hopes it will not be unduly extended!

Richard studied composition at the University of York with Richard Orton, at the Royal College of Music with John Lambert (where he won a Herbert Howells Prize for Composition) and, for a short time, with Jonathan Harvey. In New Zealand he studied at the University of Auckland with John Rimmer and John Elmsly, subsequently being awarded a doctoral scholarship and a Claude McCarthy Fellowship. An early interest in vocal music broadened later into explorations of electronic media, the orchestra and, even (his own instrument), the piano – of which a long acquaintance had led him to be rather nervous. Recurrent preoccupations have been the interplay of highly ordered and free-form elements, of mosaic structures with melismatic vocal and instrumental lines and a quasi-spiritual search for a blend of dissonance and tonality.