Biography

Born in 1954, Sinan C. Savaşkan works and lives in London, where he has been active since the 1970s as a composer, lecturer and teacher of composition, including as Head of Academic Music at Westminster School for thirty-seven years from October 1984 until his retirement in 2021. His music has been commissioned, performed and broadcast in over thirty countries by some of the foremost performers, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble directed by Petr Kotik, the Balanescu Quartet, the Smith Quartet, John Harle and Myrha Saxophone Quartet, Lontano Ensemble, Gemini Ensemble, Sydney Alpha Ensemble, Trio Basso (Cologne), Ensemble Contemporary α (Tokyo), Contemporary Arts Ensemble (London) with Zsolt Nagy, Cambridge New Music Players, the composer-guitarist Tim Brady and the pianist Yvar Mikhashoff, as well as several performances of organ and other ceremonial music in Westminster Abbey.

Important early support came from the MusICA series curated by Adrian Jack at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts), which in 1978 commissioned and premiered the first four works in the ongoing, 360-module cycle Many Stares through Semi-Nocturnal Zeiss-Blink. In 1990, Savaşkan won the Arts Council of Britain’s Dio Fund Award for his saxophone quartet The Street. His Three Dances for orchestra, Op.31 – three dance interludes from the work-in-progress Venom, an opera – were selected by the Society for the Promotion of New Music as featured work for the Manchester Composers’ Forum in 1997. Symphony No.2 ‘Age of Analysis’, commissioned by the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Composers’ Forum in 1997 and premiered under Martyn Brabbins, was featured at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, Paris in 2002, leading to broadcasts around the world, and later – during the Covid-19 lockdowns – received more votes than any other symphony in the popular Twitter competition ‘World Cup of British & Irish C20/21 Symphonies’, only to lose in the final by 49% to 51% to Tippett’s Symphony No.1.

The world premiere in New York of Symphony No.3 ‘La Rosa Enflorece and the English Cadence’ (commissioned and premiered by Petr Kotik and his S.E.M. Orchestra) led to Savaşkan being selected in 2000 as recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ prestigious Grants to Artists Award – the first British composer to receive this award. More recently, in 2015, he won a BASCA British Composer Award (later renamed the Ivors Classical Awards) in the Large Chamber category for Many Stares through Semi-Nocturnal Zeiss-Blink – Module 30, commissioned by the Octandre Ensemble.

He has written much ballet and incidental music, as well as music for film. In 2004 he was music director/composer for the University of Cambridge’s renowned triennial Greek Play, an original-language production of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus (Oedipus Rex). His score for the feature film The Invisible Life (A Vida Invisível, dir. Vitor Gonçalves) was highly commended at the 2013 Rome Film Festival and won the prize for Best Original Music in the 2015 CinEuphoria Awards. His media and stage works are published by Faber Music, London.

An original feature of Savaşkan’s works from the early 1980s onwards has been the coexistence of strict construction with, or its disruption by, seemingly contradictory, extempore elements (for many years he was an improvising musician, and he was also heavily influenced by the English experimental school of composers – including studies, performances and consultations with Cornelius Cardew and John White, and involvement in the London Musicians’ Collective).

Savaşkan is currently Composer in Residence for the Octandre Ensemble, and the holder of an award from the PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund. His Intercontinental Communication Disaster, 1877 was released in 2022 as part of the NMC label’s ‘Big Lockdown Music Survey’. A new recording by the flautist Noemi Gyori – of four works for solo flute or alto flute, two of them with electronics – is released on Métier Records in July 2025 in CD, vinyl and digital formats, and will be followed later this year by a recording of the work premiered in this evening’s concert.