Tuba, composer.
Melvyn Poore studied at the University of Birmingham, England, from 1971 to 1975, gaining a Batchelor of Music and a Master of Arts. After leaving university he remained in Birmingham for four years, working as Music Director at the Arts Lab organising concerts, music workshops and resident ensembles. He also ran a music publishing house for young British composers.
From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a freelance tubist and composer working in a wide variety of different musical situations: as soloist with and without orchestra and chamber ensembles; Cambrian Brass Quintet; Barry Guy's London Jazz Composers Orchestra; Georg Graewe's GrubenKlangOrchester; Wolfgang Fuch's King Übü Orchestrü; Radu Malfatti's Ohrkiste; European Tuba Quartet; English Tuba Consort; and the English Gamelan Orchestra. During this period Poore travelled throughout Europe, the United States and Australia performing, broadcasting, teaching, leading workshops in schools, on beaches and street corners, in canteens, colleges, clubs, castles and even concert halls.
In 1984, Poore was invited to Melbourne, Australia, for a short residency at the Victorian College of the Arts on a programme involving New Music in the Community. Similarly, during six months in 1986, he was appointed to the post of Musician-in-Residence in Lincoln, England, working with local musicians and schoolchildren on community projects and he also continued to freelance, teach and compose.
Increasingly since 1989 he has been exploring electro-acoustic possibilities for the tuba, being employed for two years as a Research Assistant at Salford College of Technology, England working with the Composers' Desktop Project on Electro-acoustic music and Live performance. He continued to develop his ideas on composition and improvisation in the electro-acoustic medium during 1991 at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, particularly in relation to the extended tuba as METAinstrument. This was further developed the following year at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (ZKM) using a NeXT computer and the IRCAM Signal Processing Workstation in connection with acoustic instruments.
March 1993 saw the completion of Poore's long-term research project into the analysis of vocalised tuba tones with the specific aim of developing a scientific basis for further composition work with the tuba in electro-acoustic music. In September of the same year he was appointed to the position of Visiting Professor for Electro-acoustic Music at the Royal College of Music, London; he was also a member of the chamber ensemble Musik Fabrik Nordrheim-Westfalen. During 1993-94 he continued another long-term project at ZKM with composer Günter Steinke to build a METAinstrument for improvisation and performance of pre-composed materials; this is on-going.
E-mail: mpoore@gmx.de