When Hitchcock objected to the introduction of music during a sequence in 'Lifeboat' (1943) he questioned the logic of having a string section appear in the middle of the ocean. "These people are lost in a lifeboat in the middle of nowhere", he is reported to have complained. "Where, then, did the orchestra come from?" To which composer Hugo Friedhofer is said to have responded "The same place the camera came from, Mr. Hitchcock."
Biography
Joseph Phibbs was born in London and studied at The Purcell School, with the support of a Suffolk County Council scholarship, before continuing his education at King's College London (B.Mus, M.Mus) and Cornell University (DMA). His teachers have included Param Vir, Sir Harrison Birtwistle. and Steven Stucky, and his works have been performed by leading ensembles in the UK and beyond including the London Sinfonietta, Britten Sinfonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, and National Symphony Orchestra (Washington). Much of his output has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and he has received commissions from the Aldeburgh, Cheltenham, and Bath festivals, among others. He has also written for the theatre, scoring for a number of productions at the Wolsey Theatre (Ipswich), Sadlers Wells, Setagaya Theatre (Tokyo), and The Globe.
Large-scale works include In Camera (BBC SO/Slatkin), Lumina (BBC SO/Slatkin, 2003 Last Night of the Proms), Tenebrae (St Albans Bach Choir/Andrew Lucas), Shruti (LSO/Petrenko), Rainland (a choral drama to a libretto by Stephen Plaice), The Spiralling Night (featured at the 2007 WASBE conference, conducted and commissioned by Phillip Scott), a Clarinet Concerto for Sarah Williamson, and a setting of Psalm 98 for choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Bachakademie Stuttgart to mark the Mendelssohn bicentenary. His largest chamber work to date, The Canticle of the Rose, was premiered at Wigmore Hall by Lisa Milne and the Belcea Quartet, and shortlisted for the 2006 RPS Chamber Music Prize. Other chamber works include FLEX (a joint RPS/BBC commission for the 2007 City of London Festival), Personnages for Nicholas Daniel, Arc de Soleil for clarinet and piano (premiered by Sarah Williamson at Wigmore Hall in 2008),The Moon's Funeral for James Bowman and Andrew Plant, and The Silence at the Song's End, a song cycle for soprano and string quartet based on poems by Nicholas Heiney. Both Lumina and The Spiralling Night were shortlisted for a British Academy Award, the former in two categories.
He has composed a considerable number of a cappella choral works, notably for Matthew Owens, with whom he is planning a CD for release in 2012/13. His Salve Regina was broadcast live from this year's Exon Singers Festival as part of Radio 3's Choral Evensong, and Shadows of Sleep, a cantata combining school choirs in Suffolk with the Britten-Pears Chamber Choir will be premiered at Snape Maltings in November 2010.
He will be Composer-in-Residence at the Presteigne Festival in 2011, in which a new piece for strings will be featured alongside a number of his chamber works. A CD of his chamber music is due to be released by NMC in 2011.
Commissions for 2011-12 include a percussion concerto for Evelyn Glennie (Cheltenham Festival, 2011), an orchestral piece for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia orchestra (2012), a work for cello and piano (Purcell Room, 2011), a concerto for harp and strings for David Watkins, and a set of piano pieces for Tomoaki Kimura (Weill Recital Hall (Carnegie Hall, New York) and Wiener Konzerthaus, 2011). An extract of an opera-in-progress, based on the novel Under the Volcano, was recently featured at Covent Garden's Linbury Theatre.
Since 2003 Phibbs has combined his composing career with the editing and promoting of Benjamin Britten's music, and he is a director of the Britten Estate Ltd. He is currently a visiting member of staff at the Purcell School and King's College London.
A number of his works are published by Faber Music and Oxford University Press, and he is represented by David Wordsworth.