Aug 12 min read

Artist Of The Month: Gareth Churchill

Image credit: Matthew Thistlewood

Artist of the Month is a feature where we put the spotlight on the incredible work of one of our members.

Our Artist of the Month for August is Gareth Churchill!

Gareth Churchill is a composer, collaborative artist, music teacher, and now clarion player. He is music teacher for Cardiff University Lifelong Learning, and has been a member of Paraorchestra since 2018.

He originally trained as an oboist, and was fortunate to play at a professional level, before a stroke left him with cognitive, sensory and physical impairments aged 20. This redirected his path towards composition.

As a composer, the sound of his music is deeply rooted in his personal, lived experience of the mechanical interacting with the organic, and, often with an autobiographical facet, his work frequently aspires to give musical voice and artistic expression to the lived experiences of others.

Grinding (2020) for male voices and piano was created during lockdown in collaboration with South Wales Gay Men’s Chorus. It takes as its starting point the experiences of gay men in south Wales on dating applications, and was shortlisted for the Royal Philharmonic Society Inspiration Award.

Trepanator (2023) for soprano and oboe took its inspiration from Bore Hole, Joe Mellen’s seminal self-trepanation memoir. Created in collaboration with Wellcome Collection, the work explores the history and culture of drilling a hole in the head of a living person.

The 9 Fridas is an ongoing project adapting Kaite O’Reilly’s performance text into dramatic musical theatre, with the intention of reclaiming and celebrating Frida Kahlo as a disability icon. The project started as an Unlimited R and D commission in 2021, and an ACW create grant facilitated a second phase of development in 2023. The same year, an internal artist development scheme at Paraorchestra introduced Gareth to the clarion, an accessible, digital musical instrument.

Clarion Call: after instantly seeing the clarion’s potential, Gareth explored and received creative steps funding from ACW to begin a journey back to musical performance and over the last couple of months he has been exploring creating work with and for the clarion. This culminated in a sharing presentation and Gareth’s first live solo performance at Cardiff University Concert Hall on 24/07/24.

In starting my journey with the clarion, I aspired to recover some of what I lost as an oboist, when I had my stroke. Words cannot describe the joy of performing before an audience again after so many years, and I feel determined to try to establish myself as a composer/performer, embedding the clarion in my future work and, I hope, making me one of the instrument’s leading exponents.