THE AUTHOR
Sam Richards is a composer, improviser, writer and poet, singer, broadcaster and teacher at various levels. He is the son of the writer Allen Saddler. He currently teaches part time on the music degree at Plymouth University as well as being an instructor in piano and composition for the Totnes School of Piano.
After a year at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Sam became a student at Dartington College of Arts both on the original teachers’ course and later on the music degree.
He regards his main teachers as composer/improvisers Alfred Nieman and Cornelius Cardew and folk musicians Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl, none of whom taught at Dartington.
After being a student he became a frequent visiting lecturer at Dartington specializing in experimental composition and folk music. In the college’s final phase he was an Associate Lecturer. His classes in musical improvisation were highly original and led to various performances both on and off campus.
His compositions are known for their use of unconventional scoring, for using wide and unusual physical spaces, and sometimes the involvement of large numbers of performers. His Fish Music, involving string players, improvisers and live or filmed fish was performed at the Millenium Centre, Cardiff, for the CAM Festival in 2015. Fish Music was also broadcast on Radio 3 in 2012. His About Time – Voices was premiered by the Cornelius Cardew Choir in San Francisco Central Library in 2009. His music has also been performed at the Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival, Totnes Festival, and many venues throughout the Westcountry. He has created scores and improvisations for dance companies, and regularly plays with the improvisation ensemble Half Moon Assemblage with Elie Fruchter, Lona Kozik and others. He also plays locally with The Jazzlab.
He has broadcast talks, created docu-dramas and contributed music for BBC Radios 3 and 4, and is now involved with Dartington’s community radio station Soundart Radio both as a broadcaster and Chair of its Board. For Soundart he is co-presenter with Lona Kozik of The Pulse, a monthly programme devoted to today’s contemporary music, and The Roots Show, a monthly trawl through archives of vernacular music from all over the world.
From 1971 through to the present he has documented oral traditions and folklore mainly in the Westcountry. His archive of sound recordings is now housed in the British Library.
His published books are:
Dartington College of Arts – Learning by Doing. Longmarsh Press, 2015
The Engaged Musician, Centre House Press, 2013
John Cage As…, Amber Lane Press, 1996
Sonic Harvest – Towards Musical Democracy, 1992
The English Folksinger (with Tish Stubbs), Collins Publishers, 1976
He has written for The Wire, The Guardian, New Statesman, Art in Education, Folk Music Journal, Oral History, fRoots, and other music publications.
He is also a poet and has read locally for The Language Club, Plymouth; Cross Country Writers, Plymouth; Trade Winds, Scorriton, and Totnes Writers’ Collective. His poem Slow Piano Drag was published in a Saturday edition of the Plymouth Evening Herald in July 2015.
See his website at:
http://www.samrichards.org.uk/
Read Sam's Blog "The Engaged Musician"
See also the Wikipedia page about him.