BIOGRAPHY
Photograph: Wai Lok Cheung
Amy Crankshaw’s music has been described as having “a real feeling of ecstasy” (Planet Hugill); “carrying images and sensations“ (Ôlyrix); and as “an act of love” (Opera Now).
Her work is performed internationally, with commissions by Radio France, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, South African Music Rights Organisation, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Ensemble Matters, and performances at Barbican Hall, La Scala Paris, Centre in the Square, Silk Street Theatre, Vorarlberg Museum, Festival Présences, ISCM World New Music Days, Aix en Juin, Grahamstown National Arts Festival, and Bloomsbury Festival.
She has been appointed to the London Symphony Orchestra’s 2023-2024 Soundhub scheme. She is the winner of the 2023-2024 Richmond Concert Society’s Muriel Dawson Composition Award. She was awarded the 2015 Priaulx Rainier Prize, won second prize in the South African Music Rights Organisation’s Overseas Scholarship Competition for Composers in 2014, and won the South African College of Music's orchestral composition competition in 2014.
Amy has held multiple residencies with Académie du Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, including the Chamber Music Residency in 2022, and was commissioned by Festival d'Aix to co-create a site-specific chamber opera for Aix en Juin in the same year. In 2021, she was commissioned to write a new orchestration of Pauline Viardot’s salon opera Cendrillon for Guildhall School’s 2021 Autumn opera season, and was composer-in-residence with the London City Orchestra in 2016.
“Clearly Crankshaw relishes what voices can do.”
- PLANET HUGILL
Amy is a Doctoral candidate (DMus composition) at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, with research in how visceral experiences of the natural world can be integrated within her compositions. She is supervised by Julian Philips, Hollie Harding, and Nell Catchpole. She holds an MA in Opera Making and Writing from GSMD, and obtained her Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees in composition from the South African College of Music, where she studied under Hendrik Hofmeyr.
She has received several awards for her work including the Myra Chapman Undergraduate Scholarship, the Stephanie Garnett Memorial Prize, the Meyer Levinson Prize and the EE Coutts Memorial Scholarship. Amy is grateful for the generous support of the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Boltini Trust, the Guildhall School Trust, the South African Music Rights Organisation, and the South African National Research Foundation.
Amy was born and raised in South Africa and is currently based in London, UK.