Adam Gorb was born in 1958 and started composing at the age of ten. At fifteen he wrote a set of piano pieces - A Pianist's Alphabet -of which a selection were performed on BBC Radio 3. In 1977 he went to Cambridge University to study music, where his teachers included Hugh Wood and Robin Holloway. After graduating in 1980 he divided his time between composition and working as a musician in the theatre. In 1987 he started studying privately with Paul Patterson, and then, from 1991 at the Royal, Academy of Music where he gained a MMus degree and graduated with the highest honours, including the Principal's Prize in 1993.
Works include Metropolis for wind band, which has won several prizes including the Walter Beeler Memorial Prize in the USA in 1994 and is available on CD; Prelude, Interlude and Postlude for piano, which won the Purcell Composition Prize in 1995; Kol Simcha, a ballet given over fifty performances by the Rambert Dance Company; Awayday for Wind Band which has had several hundred performances since its premiere in 1996 and has been commercially recorded three times; a Violin Sonata premiered at the Spitalfields Festival in 1996; Reconciliation for Clarinet and Piano, commissioned for the Park Lane Young Artists New Year series in 1998 and Elements, a Percussion Concerto for Evelyn Glennie and the Royal Northern College of Music Wind Ensemble which was released on CD in 2001. Since 1999 premieres have included a Clarinet Concerto for Nicholas Cox and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Weimar for chamber ensemble, also in 2000 and Downtown Diversions, a trombone concerto, at the CBDNA conference in Texas in February 2001. Recent works include a string quartet for the Maggini Quartet that was premiered at Bromsgrove music club in February 2002; Straitjacket for tuba and piano for James Gourlay; Towards Nirvana, which received its first performance by the Tokyo Kosei Wind Ensemble in October 2002, and Diaspora for eleven strings which was given its premiere by the Goldberg Ensemble at their contemporary festival at the RNCM in February 2003.
Adam Gorb is Head of School of Composition and Contemporary Music at the Royal Northern College of Music. For more information see his website at: http://www.adamgorb.co.uk
