John Duggan is a composer and singer. He was a chorister at Westminster Cathedral and went on to study music at Keble College, Oxford where he also played drums in jazz and pop bands and developed an interest in electronic music. He has written for a number of choirs including Commotio, Westminster Cathedral Choir, the Hildegard Choir and East Oxford Community Choir, and has written commissions for the Edington Music Festival, Crossover Intergenerational Dance Group, Oxford Youth Dance and The Oxford-Grenoble Association.
John is also an experienced live-sound and recording engineer and has worked with a broad range of different artists from Radiohead and The Manic Street Preachers to Faber Music, The European Union Baroque Orchestra and Alamire.
In 2006, John co-founded Oxford-based choir Sospiri with Christopher Watson, and is now their official composer-in-residence. Since 2007 John has written a series of settings of poems from World War I, the first of which, Wilfred Owen's 'Futility', was recorded by Commotio for their disk, Night. A more recent set was recorded by Sospiri for their disk Requiem.
"I've listened to and played music for most of my life. By the age of twelve I already wanted to be a composer. At the time I was a boy chorister at Westminster Cathedral, and my dream was to write sacred vocal music in the great European choral tradition. Now, many of my musical peers are deeply involved in new electronic music, and I'm fascinated how the voice combines with these modern instrumental forces and textures both in live and recorded music."