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Judith Bingham has, until recently, combined the careers of professional singer and serious composer – an almost automatic coupling in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but a rarer one in more recent times. Born in Nottingham, and raised mostly in Sheffield, she began composing as a small child, and then studied composing and singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London: her composition studies there with Alan Bush and Eric Fenby were later supplemented by lessons from Hans Keller. She was awarded the Principal's prize in 1971, and 6 years later the BBC Young Composer award. She is the 2004 winner of the Barlow Prize for a cappella music.
After singing as an amateur with the then BBC Choral Society (now the BBC Symphony Chorus), she had begun working as a freelance member of the BBC Singers and several other choirs and vocal ensembles. In 1983, she joined the BBC Singers as a full time member of the alto section; with them she toured extensively, and sang many solo parts. She left the Singers at the end of 1995 to concentrate on her activities as a composer, though she continued to sing professionally for some years.
Judith Bingham's compositional voice is a distinctive one: her singer's feeling for expressive melodic lines is complemented by a strong rhythmic and harmonic sense. Her music is never purely abstract in conception, but always shaped and coloured by extra-musical sources of inspiration both from the natural world and from the world of arts and ideas. Although Bingham's output is marked by the number and variety of its choral works, she has always been seen as an all-rounder,and the scope of her activities has included pieces for brass band, symphonic wind ensemble and various chamber groups and solo instruments, concertos for trumpet and bassoon, and several impressive works for large orchestra.
[by Anthony Burton]
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