John Godfrey

The group made several CDs for Decca Argo, New Tone and Donemus, which include John's works Euthanasia and Garden Instruments, S U S Y W I M P S and "Gallows Hill", as well as his arrangements of Diderik Wagenaar's Metrum and Steve Martland's Shoulder to Shoulder. John appears as a performer on all Icebreaker's CDs up to and including Rogue's Gallery. In 1997, John was invited to join the Crash Ensemble. It quickly became Ireland's foremost and most adventurous new-music ensemble, and has performed not only frequently in Dublin but also throughout Ireland, Sweden, Germany, Holland, Canada, Australia and the USA. John and UCC-graduate Sarah O'Halloran ran the 2008 Quiet Music Festival, at which the group the Quiet Music Ensemble was founded. The group performed new works by Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, David Toop, Mark Applebaum, Karen Power and Juraj Kos, all of whom were present. The Festival also included the first Deep Listening Retreat in Ireland. In 2009, the QME performed the closing night of that year's Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, with guest David Toop. Recent compositions include Call of the Carolina Parakeet (2005), for Crash Ensemble, which received its premiere in Cork in spring 2005 and for David Adams (2005), for organ, as well as a number of soundscapes, including "Hermaphrodite" for the CruX Dance Company, and The Abstract Despotisms of Calculus for Crash Ensemble. John's particular compositional influences include minimalists and post-minimalists, the most formative being, perhaps, Louis Andriessen and the Hague School. He has particular interests in work that exhibits Cage's idea that certain kinds of new music are about "perception, and the arousal of it in us". He is fascinated with the analytical concept of depth-coherence in music - and, intermittently, other forms of human endeavour - and with performance, most especially the performance of contemporary music.

John Godfrey studied at University of York.