Judith Bingham

Judith Bingham’s music is hard to place. But there are common threads through her output—a directness, clarity and muscularity, a rootedness in English geography and culture, if not obviously its music. Thirteen years in the BBC Singers gives the British composer a unique vantage point in her choral writing. Born in Nottingham in 1952, Bingham studied both voice and composition at the Royal Academy of Music. There’s a boldness, an edgy singularity, to Bingham’s early works that gradually coalesces into a simpler, more direct musical language, with voices, brass bands and organ all recurring features. Key pieces include the large-scale orchestral Chartres (1988), the work whose success pushed Bingham to compose full time; the evocative musical “ghost story” for choir and brass Salt in the Blood (commissioned by the 1995 BBC Proms); and the dramatic, folk-music infused Irish Tenebrae (1990). In 2015, Bingham’s Ghostly Grace was performed at the reinterment of King Richard III in Leicester Cathedral.