Born in Glasgow, on Jan 5th, 1950. William Sweeney is a Scottish composer. He studied at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (1967–70), and at the RAM (1970–73) with Alan Hacker (clarinet) and Harrison Birtwistle (composition). He worked as a woodwind tutor for a number of years and later taught composition at the University of Glasgow. He won the Aeleph Prize for composition in 1981, and has twice been awarded the McEwan Commission from the University of Glasgow (1981 and 1989).
Sweeney’s interest in Scottish traditional music is audibly present throughout his oeuvre. The textures of Salm an Fhearainn (1987), for 18-part a cappella choir, are derived from the heterophonic style of Gaelic psalm-singing, while Nine Days, for clarinet with drone, is cast in the form of a piobaireachd. The melody is varied not only in its ornamentation, as in traditional pibroch, but in its contour; also modified is the instrument’s tone-colour, through alternative fingerings. In An rathad ùr (1989), for tenor saxophone and orchestra, the concern is with a reconciliation of art music with jazz, and a blurring of the distinction between improvised (or more freely structured) and precisely notated music. In the rhythmic language of such works as Maqam (1984) and The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1988), with their exploration of ostinato and other techniques of varied repetition, Sweeney has been influenced by ancient Greek poetry as well as by Indian and Arab traditions.
Biography from Oxford Music Online

What happens to a flame when it blows out?

Claire is a Scottish composer, orchestrator, lyricist, and music educator currently living in Glasgow., Claire originally gained a first class BSc(hons) in Maths Statistics & Management science before returning to her passion for music. With support from the Ian McGlashan trust fund, she completed a BA Applied Music, studying a range of subjects including piano, trombone and composition, and playing in the university orchestra and Big Band. She graduated with 1st class honours and was awarded the Alexander Stone award in her final year. 

Kaija Saariaho is a prominent member of a group of Finnish composers and performers who are now, in mid-career, making a worldwide impact. She studied composition in Helsinki, Freiburg and Paris, where she has lived since 1982. Her studies and research at IRCAM have had a major influence on her music and her characteristically luxuriant and mysterious textures are often created by combining live music and electronics.

Although much of her catalogue comprises chamber works, from the mid-nineties she has turned increasingly to larger forces and broader structures, such as the operas L’Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater and Emilie. Around the operas there have been other vocal works, notably the ravishing Château de l’âme (1996), Oltra mar (1999), Quatre instants (2002), True Fire (2014). The oratorio La Passion de Simone, portraying the life and death of the philosopher Simone Weil, formed part of Sellars’s
international festival ‘New Crowned Hope’ in 2006/07. The chamber version of the oratorio was premiered by La Chambre aux echos at the Bratislava Melos Ethos Festival in 2013.

Saariaho has claimed the major composing awards in The Grawemeyer Award, The Wihuri Prize, The Nemmers Prize,The Sonning Prize, The Polar Music Prize. In 2018 she was honoured with the BBVA Foundation’s Frontiers of Knowledge Award. In 2015 she was the judge of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award. Always keen on strong educational programmes, Kaija Saariaho was the music mentor of the 2014-15 Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative and was in residence at U.C. Berkeley Music Department in 2015.

Saariaho continues to collaborate for the stage. Only The Sound Remains, her most recent opera collaboration with Peter Sellars, was premiered in Amsterdam in 2016. In the same year her first opera L’Amour de Loin was presented in its New York premiere by the Metropolitan Opera in a new production by Robert Le Page. The Park Avenue Armory and New York Philharmonic presented a celebration of her orchestral music with visual accompaniment. February 2017 saw Paris come alive with her work when she was featured composer of Radio France Festival Presences.

Her new opera, Innocence, will be premiered in July 2021 at Festival International d’Art Lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence.

In 1989, Armenian composer Stepan Rostomyan was invited to work at Glasgow University’s electro acoustic music studio, experimenting with environmental sounds from his homeland, children’s chorus, prayer chant and burvar, a liturgical instrument.  Paragon Ensemble of Scotland commissioned the resulting Symphony No.3 with support from the Scottish Arts Council for the “New Beginnings” International Festival. They premiered the work in the Stephenson Hall of the then Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in November of that year.