Passing of Music Composition 1997 Winner, British Composer Simon Bainbridge

It is with great sorrow that the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition announces the death of British composer Simon Bainbridge.  He won the Award in 1997 for his work Ad Ora Incerta (At the Uncertain Hour), a four-movement song cycle for mezzo soprano, bassoon solo, and orchestra, based on Holocaust-themed poems by Primo Levi.  Bainbridge maintained a long and fruitful association with the University of Louisville School of Music thereafter, as a visiting professor, as a good friend to many on the faculty, and as an inspiration to the UofL composition students who worked with him.  His music is performed all over the world, and he also had a long and distinguished career as an educator, teaching and heading up programs at premiere British conservatories.

He was 68 and been fighting serious health problems for several years.

Ad Ora Incerta was premiered in London by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bainbridge himself.  The American premiere was by the Louisville Orchestra in 2001.  Soloists on that occasion were mezzo Christine Cairns and bassoonist Matthew Karr, principal bassoonist of the Louisville Orchestra and bassoon professor at UofL.  The performance was conducted by Robert Franz.

We send our condolences to his wife Lynda Richardson, their daughter Becky Bainbridge, and Becky’s husband and children.