PROFILE
PROFILE
Roseanna is a composer, conductor and performer. She is currently based in Leeds, but is actively working on creative projects across the UK, and beyond. Through her work, Roseanna strives to actualise a post-critical, and decidedly feminist, approach to composition, using the principles of post-structural feminist musicology and philosophy. Roseanna's works often comprise collective and community projects, radically unfinished forms, and multi-media endeavours. Roseanna is particularly interested in widening the engagement of contemporary classical music beyond the confines of the academy, disrupting assumed flows of agency in the composer-performer-audience tripartite, and opposing the archetype of the isolated, 'genius' composer through her creative practises.
In July 2024, Roseanna was a participant in the JAM on the Marsh composers' residency, Writing for Opera: here, she oversaw the premiere of her opera War Requiem (libretto by Grahame Davies, CVO), with the work being reviewed in Opera Now Magazine as 'true art of exposition' (Opera Now, 2024). Earlier in 2024, Roseanna composed new pieces for The Fidelio Trio, The Marsyas Trio, the Inter Alios Choir, and the Inter Alios Chamber Choir, all of which have been premiered across the UK in recent months. In November 2023, Roseanna’s debut musical, Beyond Today was premiered in a four-night run in the ADC theatre, financed by Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society, and described in reviews as a 'soft, sorrowful and stirring ode to the importance of queer love’ (Varsity, 2023). Roseanna has also collaborated with internationally-acclaimed ensembles Incantati and Sopriola.
Roseanna is in demand as an arranger and conductor. In 2021 and 2022, Roseanna worked in collaboration with composer Ewan Campbell and the Bennet Institute of Diversity in the creation of Hebrides: Redacted and Beethoven 6: Extinction Projects, written for theWilderness Festival Orchestra. She also held the prestigious positions of Resident Composer and Conductor in the 2022 Minerva Festival, alongside resident conductor positions with Cambridge University Philharmonic Orchestra and Cambridge University Opera Society from 2019-2022.
Roseanna has performed internationally as a vocalist, harpist, flautist and pianist, making appearances in prestigious venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, St Martin in the Fields, the Canadian Parliament Buildings and St Mark’s Basilica. She has appeared as a vocalist on The One Show, BBC Look East, and as a finalist in the 2018 season of Music for Youth as co-leader and member of a Capella ensemble Novem Consort. Roseanna has also performed in the BBC Proms multiple times. She remains active as a wedding, events and recording harpist and choir director: she is currently the musical director of Love Pop Choir: Roundhay.
Roseanna completed her MPhil in composition at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge in June, 2024, graduating with a distinction and the top results in her cohort. During her master's studies, she was supported by a Vaughan Williams Postgraduate Bursary, and a bursary award from the Churchill College Chapel Trust for her role as Assistant Conductor and Assistant Director of Music of the Inter Alios Choir, 2023-2024. Roseanna previously graduated with first-class honours in her BA in music from Churchill College, Cambridge in July 2022, where she was a choral scholar and the college's Music Sizar: consequently, Roseanna held the position of Prize Scholarship Award Holder in Churchill College from 2022-2023.
In the coming months, Roseanna looks forward to: the premiere of her new choral work Dreamland in central London on the 9th November, 2024, commissioned by VOCE Chamber Choir; workshopping her new orchestral piece in her 2024 residency with the City of Cambridge Symphony Orchestra; and the premiering of her Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis by the Inter Alios Choir.