Philip Grange studied with Peter Maxwell Davies between 1975 and 1981 both privately and at the Dartington Summer School of Music. In 1976 he entered York University where David Blake was his composition teacher. Among Grange’s earliest pieces are Cimmerian Nocturne (1979), premiered at the St Magnus Festival and later performed at the Proms, and Variations (1986) which was featured at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1988. In the 1990s Grange completed two important BBC commissions, Focus and Fade (1991/2) for orchestra and Lowry Dreamscape (1992) for brass band. The decade ended with a Clarinet Concerto for the RNCM Wind Band and Grange’s former clarinet teacher Alan Hacker. Since 2000 his compositions have included two BBC commissions premiered by the BBC Philharmonic, Eclipsing (2004) for orchestra and a Violin Concerto (2019) for Carolin Widmann, three string quartets, and major chamber pieces such as Shifting Thresholds (2016).
Grange’s compositions have been performed throughout the world, most recently in Festivals in Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Belgium, México, Switzerland and the U.S. In the UK his work has been performed at most major festivals, including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield, Aldeburgh and Cheltenham. A significant number of Grange’s works have been recorded and released on CD and two of his three single-composer CDs with Gemini have been awarded Critic’s Choice in Gramophone magazine. His large-scale wind ensemble piece Cloud Atlas (2009) was awarded a BASCA prize in 2010 and his compositions are published by Peters Edition. Grange is currently Professor of Composition at the University of Manchester, a position he has held since 2001.