Biography

Rodney Sharman lives in Vancouver, BC, where he is Composer-in-Residence with Early Music Vancouver and the Pacific Baroque Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Victoria Symphony, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada and the Vancouver Symphony. In addition to concert music, Rodney Sharman writes music for cabaret, opera and dance. He works regularly with choreographer James Kudelka, for whom he has written scores for Oregon Ballet Theatre, San Francisco Ballet and Coleman Lemieux & Co. (Toronto). Sharman was awarded First Prize in the 1984 CBC Competition for Young Composers and the 1990 Kranichsteiner Prize in Music, Darmstadt, Germany. His score for the music-dance-theatre piece, From The House Of Mirth, won the 2013 Dora Mavor Moore Award for outstanding sound design/composition (choreography by James Kudelka, text by Alex Poch Goldin after Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth). He was a 2014 Djerassi Artist-in-Residence, Woodside, California.

Composer website:  http://www.rodneysharman.com/

Featured Works

Incantation, for solo bassoon, harp and string quartet.

Incantation (2007) consists of chants and refrains for solo bassoon, harp and string quartet. Almost every note in the quartet and harp part is doubled at the interval of the twelfth, an overtone of the harmonic series. The bassoonist is sometimes asked to create a tone rich in harmonics, imitating the sound of overtone singing (Tibetan chant), creating a rich, enveloping sound, enhanced by the quartet and harp parts.
– Rodney Sharman

Featured in Canadian Waves (Special Edition June 2016)