Biography
Ian Carpenter (b. 1969) leads a busy life as an engineer, a composer and an active choral singer with the Bristol-based chamber choir Exultate Singers. He composes mainly choral, vocal and piano works.
He started to compose in his mid-teens, having sung in a local church choir from the age of nine and learned to play the piano from the age of seven. His academic focus was in science which led to studies for a BSc in Engineering and a PhD in Manufacturing Engineering, both at the University of Durham. He pursued an initial career path as an academic, working as a Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and then as a Lecturer in Engineering back at Durham University for six years.
But the composing always continued in his spare time and he wrote a range of liturgical and Christmas choral works, along with some small collections of piano miniatures. About a dozen of these early works were published by Oecumuse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2009 an unscheduled career break from his engineering work allowed him to take an MA in Music Composition at Bristol University, studying under Professor Neal Farwell and Professor John Pickard.
Now working for a precision measurement engineering company in Gloucestershire, he continues to compose and sing. Although focussed mainly on short choral pieces, he has completed four song cycles for soprano and piano, setting poems mostly by female poets such as Christina Rossetti, Sara Teasdale, Michael Field and Mathilde Blind. Several other larger scale composition projects have also recently been completed. A request for a new a cappella setting of Good King Wenceslas in 2010 was followed by a string of further unaccompanied SATB Christmas carol arrangements, fifty of which are gathered together in the book, Nowell Sing We. The COVID19 lockdown in 2020 was a strange time for everyone but gave many composers a time boost to get composing and this led to a return to writing progressive graded piano miniatures. 105 new pieces, arranged in seven books, are now complete – more information on these will be coming soon!
Ian’s anthem Blessed are all they that fear the Lord has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and his setting of May the road rise to meet you was featured on BBC One’s Songs of Praise. Two of his carols, Dormi Jesu and Deck the hall were recorded by City of Bristol Choir for their debut CD, Realms of Glory, released in 2013. Local commissions include The St Mary Redcliffe Mass for the Occasional Choir of St Mary Redcliffe Parish Church, Bristol and an ATB setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, written for the lay clerks of Bristol Cathedral. His music has been performed by the choirs of Chichester Cathedral, Bristol Cathedral and the BBC Singers. Several of his anthems are published by Boosey & Hawkes and the Royal School of Church Music.