Goldsmiths - University of London

Ian Gardiner, B.Mus, M.A.

Ian Gardiner is a composer and arranger working in film and TV, studio and commercial music, contemporary classical music, jazz, theatre, and contemporary dance. He has previously taught at the University of Liverpool, the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts, and the University of Salford. He specialises in the analysis and composition of music in film and television, and is co-editor (with Anahid Kassabian) of the journal Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (Liverpool University Press).

As a composer he has been commissioned by the BBC, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the John Harle Band, Trio Phoenix, Harmonie Band, and many other ensembles; recently he has been among a group of composers working in association with Ensemble 10:10 in Liverpool, resulting in a set of five commissioned pieces written between 2004 and 2007. For seven years he also directed the group George W. Welch for whom he wrote many pieces and arrangements, including the work for radio Monument, commissioned by BBC Radio 3, which won the Special Prize for Music Programmes at the 1994 Prix Italia, and also a Sony Radio Award in the same year. His piece for symphonic winds, Toccata, Canzona, Ricercare, won a 2005 British Composer Award in the Wind and Brass category.

As an arranger and orchestrator he has worked with Elmer Bernstein, Will Gregory and Goldfrapp, John Harle, The Christians, Pete Wylie, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Sir Willard W. White, and the Royal Shakespeare Company. As a media composer he has worked in TV and advertising, and has also composed several new scores for silent film including The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the 1933 puppet animation Fétiche, and Joseph Cornell’s 1936 montage movie, Rose Hobart.
At Goldsmiths he teaches undergraduate courses in Film Music, Arranging Jazz & Commercial Music, Songwriting, Applied Composition, Orchestration, Mixed-Media Project, and Popular Music: Ways of Listening, and currently convenes the undergraduate programme in Popular Music Studies. He also currently acts as external examiner for composition programmes at the Royal Academy of Music, Royal Holloway, University of London, and University of Bristol.