Audrey Riley
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Photos credits: 1. Live, Photographer unknown 2. Ourdoor, Beth Walsh ,3 Silhouette, Laura Evans, 4. Over Shoulder, Lukas Biinder 5. B&W Studio, Unknown
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Audrey Riley is a cellist and improvising musician. After training at the Guildhall School of Music with Leonard Stehn, she has been actively performing and commissioning contemporary music since the early 1980s, working in a wide range of music.
Over five decades as an arranger, MD, and musician in rock and popular music and with her string quartet, she has contributed to several Grammy award-winning recordings for Muse, Coldplay, the Foo Fighters, and Dave Matthews (amongst many others), conducting London based session orchestras, as well as international session groups from the Chicago and Seattle Symphony orchestras, and La Scala Milan. She currently arranges for and performs with Birdy, a collaboration which began in 2011. Audrey has worked with Gavin Bryars since 2003 as a guest musician in his Ensemble and is a dedicatee of several works. Between 2001 and 2011, she was a musician for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, performing works by Cage, Wolff, and Bryars with Takehisa Kosugi, Christian Wolff, and the musicians and composers of the Company. The experience instigated a subsequent doctoral research project at the Music, Technology, and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester. Her PhD “In Pursuit of Non-Knowledge: Perspectives on Performing with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company” was passed in 2021. Her research lies in the area of music performance practice. She is interested in environments and processes for experimental performance, involving safe spaces for improvisation and exploring ‘non-knowledge’ or a no-mind in performance. The adoption of a transpersonal stance in a self-determined experimental practice (whether working with a written score, or through co-creativity) is a particular interest. Following the example of Takehisa Kosugi’s approach to Cage, she is interested in the revealing of immaterial realms as a means to transcend. She is currently developing post-doctoral performance projects, recorded composition and experimental projects, and guiding an open experimental series, Chaos?, to explore these ideas. She is connected to the Orpheus Institute, Ghent, where she is preparing her thesis for publication as a monograph. Other recent publications include The Flower of Friendship, a chapter contribution to the edited collection marking Gavin Bryars’ 80th birthday, Conversations with Gavin Bryars for the Orpheus Institute SONUS series, and Open Signal 5:11, an experimental recording for the Pente series. Audrey is an educator with many years of experience giving masterclasses and seminars and teaching at various universities and colleges, including Brunel, Goldsmiths, York, Kent, and the Rambert Dance School. She is currently a senior lecturer in performance research, composition, and ensemble skills at the Institute for Contemporary Music Performance in London. Audrey joined Icebreaker Ensemble as cellist for its performance at the Shaw Theatre in 1989, and is currently the ensemble’s MD. Audrey Riley's web page. |