Damien Harron is a co-founder of BackBeat Percussion Quartet with which he has received numerous awards including the Royal Overseas League Ensemble Prize (UK), the Concert Artists Guild Prize (USA) and the Gold medal at the Osaka Chamber Music Festa (Japan). These awards have led to major international concert tours, including five tours of Japan and concerts in Merkin Hall and Weill Hall, New York, featuring many of his compositions. He has also appeared with many of the UK’s leading orchestras and ensembles. As a soloist he has gained a reputation as an adventurous performer of new music with a special interest in the commissioning and performance of theatrical works. He has also developed his interests in a great many global styles of percussion playing to gain a reputation as an extremely versatile and imaginative percussionist.
As a composer, his work often explores what he considers to be the human element of performance in terms of physicality and theatre. He has also written many works for younger, less experienced musicians alongside professionals (notably his BBC prom commission Carnival of Rhythms for the 2002 Blue Peter Prom). He has made recordings for Mode, NMC, NonClassical and Tzadik labels among others, and he is currently the pathway leader for classical music at Leeds College of Music, where he runs their exciting New Music Collective, a cross-genre amplified ensemble.
He is also a member of the cutting edge new music groups Black Hair, Decibel and Noszferatu and has written music for these groups. As a conductor, He also works in the sphere of new music. Highlights include the conducting of a broadcast on Danish National Radio from the Sphor Festival, Aarhus in 2006. He is an active researcher, having recently completed a translation of one of the major works by the renowned French composer, George Aperghis. He received his PhD in composition from the University of York in 2008.
