Composer: Dillon, James (b. 1950)

James Dillon was born in Glasgow on 29 October 1950, and his music has been published by Peters Edition since 1982. In that year Parjanya-Vata, for solo cello, won the Kransichsteiner Musikpreis at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. The work's Sanskrit title refers to the ancient Vedic hymns in which parjanya and vata are the personifications of rain and wind. Dillon studied Indian music during the early 1970s with Punita Gupta, and some of the rhythmic techniques that he encountered are referred to in Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha, for solo percussionist. Dillon was re-invited by Darmstadt to present new works throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, James Dillon worked on Nine Rivers, an ambitious group of large-scale pieces that the composer conceived, not as a cycle, but as a collection of works with certain 'internal symmetries'. The nine works are scored for various forces, ranging from the solo percussion and electronics of La coupure, through ensemble pieces such as East 11th St NY 10003, to the largest works - Viriditas, for sixteen solo voices, and Oceanos. This last piece, the 'ocean of oceans', is Nine Rivers' delta, bringing together all the forces previously deployed throughout the series and including more than fifty musicians and live electronics. Oceanos was commissioned for the BBC Proms 1996, and the first performance was given by conductor Richard Bernas and Music Projects/London. As well as the BBC, commissioners for other pieces in the Nine Rivers series include IRCAM, Ensemble InterContemporain, the Oslo Sinfonietta and Glasgow 1990 European City of Culture.

Dillon says that he embarked upon the Nine Rivers project in part to escape the frustratingly 'atomistic' nature of a composer's activities. The intricate references of this massive and complex meditation on time range from environmental concerns to the nature of musical language connected through the metaphor of the river. Other grouped works include: L'évolution du vol, a song cycle for female voice and chamber ensemble; the violin series that makes up Traumwerk, of which the first book, for two violins, won the 1997 Royal Philharmonic Society award for chamber-scale composition; and The Book of Elements, a cycle in five volumes for solo piano inspired by the pianist Roger Woodward, Volume 5 of which won Dillon a rare second Royal Philharmonic Society Award in 2003.

Dillon is closely associated with a number of the world’s leading contemporary music ensembles. He has been a guest lecturer at many universities throughout the world, and was named Distinguished International Visitor by New York University in 2001–2002. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Huddersfield and in 2007 took up the position of Professor of Composition at the University of Minnesota.