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 Emeritus Professor 

Personal statement

Roger Heaton is Emeritus Professor of Music at ºÚÁÏÕýÄÜÁ¿ and former Subject Leader for Music. As a clarinettist he performs throughout Europe. He has played with the Arditti, Kreutzer and Smith String Quartets and the the Fidelio Trio and was a member of the London Sinfonietta.

He has been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since 1986, was Music Director of Rambert Dance Company (1988-93) and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (1982-94). His early solo CDs of works by Reich, Bryars, Feldman and others (1998), and Hymnos, with music by Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle (1998), won critics awards in the Sunday Times and BBC Music Magazine.

Subsequent recordings include chamber music by Erhard Grosskopf (2001), Giacinto Scelsi's clarinet concerto Kya (2002), Morton Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet (2004), solo music by Tom Johnson (2006) and Hugh Wood's chamber music (2009).

Two albums were released in 2013: solo works by Boulez and Radulescu and a commissioned clarinet quintet by Mihailo Trandafilovski with the Kreutzer Quartet.

A duo disc of music for bass clarinet and double bass by Gavin Bryars, Through the Night, with Bryars on bass came out in 2024.

A further disc of solo music by Trandafilovski came out in 2023 and a double album of music by Justin Connolly including Gymel for clarinet and cello was released in February 2025.

Festival appearances have included the Warsaw Autumn, Vilnius, CDMC Madrid, Prague, Bergen, Odense, Tallin, Riga, and the Valencia Biennale; touring with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble in the UK and Europe; concerts with the Fidelio Trio and the Kreutzer Quartet in programmes including Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, in Modena, London, Waterford Festival Ireland and Cyprus at the International Contemporary Music Festival in Nicosia.

His book The Versatile Clarinet was published by Routledge in December 2005; he has written a chapter for The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (2012) and has contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (2018).

He contributed a chapter to Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox, Routledge (2016) and more recently a chapter on music and dance in The Music of Gavin Bryars (Kahn and Averill, 2024), a chapter on contemporary clarinet techniques (University of Minho Press, 2020), and an article on Horatiu Radulescu for the online Research Catalogue (2020).

Since 2020 he has reviewed regularly for Tempo journal (Cambridge University Press).

Academic qualifications

• BMus (Hons) Huddersfield University
• MMus King's College, London University

External examiners

• Manchester Metropolitan 1999-2003
• Goldsmiths College London University 2003-05
• Kingston University MA 2004-08 and Chief Post-graduate External 2006-08
• University of East Anglia BA and MA, 2007-10
• Royal Northern College of Music MA 2007-13
• Royal College of Music MA 2015-19

Teaching specialism

• Performance
• Contemporary music
• Music analysis

Scholarships

• CDs of solo works by Bryars and Smith 2020-21
• Book chapters on Bryars, clarinet techniques 2020
• Journal article on Radulescu 2020