Orchestra of the Swan & Philip Sheppard
Biography Orchestra of the Swan & Philip Sheppard
Philip Sheppard
is a composer, producer, virtuoso cellist, inventor, public speaker, philanthropist, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and a creative innovator who has worked with some of the biggest names in music, tech, sport and film. He is CEO of LifeScore reputed to be the world’s leading adaptive music company, incubated at Abbey Road Studios.
Philip has composed more than 65 film, gaming, television and theatrical scores including Sony PS4’s highly acclaimed video game, DETROIT: Become Human, and the Star Wars Force Awakens behind the scenes Comic Con trailer which has over 11 million YouTube plays. Philip’s first film of 2018 is Mercury 13, a Netflix original which premiered at the SFFilm Festival. His other major film works include The Final Year, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, In the Shadow of the Moon (which received an International Film Critics Award nomination for Best Original Score for a Documentary and won numerous awards including the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at Sundance), Meru (which won numerous awards including the Audience Award for Documentary at Sundance), Sergio (which was nominated for a Prime Time Emmy), Legion of Brothers, which premiered at Sundance, and Chosen, starring Harvey Keitel, Bobby Fischer Against the World, The Tillman Story and Love, Marilyn. Philip was inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a member of the Music Class of 2017.
Philip regularly writes and plays with Odesza, Pretty Lights and UNKLE and has been featured as a guest artist with rock and roll legends, including Scott Walker, Grace Jones, Jimmy Page, Jeff Buckley, David Bowie, Sia, Suzanne Vega and Jarvis Cocker. His first solo orchestral album Somewhere Along the Edge was recorded at Abbey Road Studios in September 2016 and wass his first studio album away from specific movie soundtracks for some time. Each track is dedicated to someone who lives fully at the edge of life -whether explorers, artists, travelers or thinkers. In 2017, Philip collaborated once again with Odesza on their third studio album, A Moment Apart, which was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Dance/Electronic Album and Best Dance Recording for Line of Sight.
Philip Sheppard has produced many large scale and complex live events. He was the music director for the London 2012 Handover sequence at the 2008 Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony. Philip composed and produced the music for the ceremony, including a new version of the UK National Anthem. He recorded and conducted the London Symphony Orchestra playing his Olympic sequence (entitled This Is London), and produced a new version of Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis performing Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love for the culmination of the ceremony.
For the 2012 London Olympics, Philip conducted, rearranged and edited all 205 national anthems for the winners’ ceremonies. The national anthems were recorded with The London Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios. The epic challenge took 52 recording hours. The anthems produced by Philip are to be used for the next 25 years of International Olympic Committee events. His portfolio also includes being music producer for the Tour de France, the Rugby World Cup, the COP21 Paris Climate Change Summit and New Year’s Eve celebrations at the world’s tallest building in Dubai.
His stageworks include Sacred Monsters for Sylvie Guillem and Akram Khan, In-I starring Khan and Juliette Binoche, One Drop for Cirque du Soleil and a radical reversion of Handel’s Sarabande in Black, which was performed live by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, for Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2007 Paris Fashion Week show, Sarabande. This score went on to become part of the Savage Beauty exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Philip, in collaboration with James Lavelle of UNKLE, co-produced Daydreaming With Stanley Kubrick, a riveting audio-visual show set in Somerset House against iconic visuals from Stanley Kubrick’s various works.
Philip is a true technological innovator, pioneering the use of electronics in conjunction with classical music in his performances to audiences around the world. His unique approach to the creative process led to his invention of the game “Compose Yourself“, a revolutionary game that enables children to build their own symphonic works using a computer algorithm and an innovative deck of cards, leading to a front-page feature in the Wall Street Journal. “Compose Yourself” has also been recently featured by Time Magazine for Kids and Newsday.
Philip has delivered keynotes on creative innovation in conferences around the globe such as C2MTL, TTI Vanguard, and WHD.Global and for business giants such as Ernst & Young, Deloitte, YouTube, Facebook, Kyu Collective and Google. Philip Sheppard speaks about the intersection of music and data, the innate musical ability within all of us, and other topics that connect music to creativity, tech and introspection.
Philip is CEO of LifeScore – the world’s leading adaptive music company – a new way to experience music. Their endlessly adaptive music platform creates unique, real-time soundtracks for every journey. From the iconic Abbey Road Studios in London, they work with world-class musicians and composers to record and compose musical building blocks. That musical raw material is then processed by a proprietary AI platform to generate soundtracks that adapt to the listener’s environment and inputs, creating an authentic and interactive musical experience that is unique every time you engage it.
Philip is an Oscars voter after recently being made a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures, and a member of the Emmys Academy. He was honored with BBC’s Music Production of the Year for The Manchester Passion and was recently named as one of Origin Magazine’s “Top 100 Creatives in the U.S.” He is also the recipient of a RAM Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award from the Royal Academy of Music for his services to music and education.
Orchestra of the Swan
With its breathtaking range of musical activity, Orchestra of the Swan, under the Artistic Direction of David Le Page, is passionate about audience inclusivity as exemplified by its adventurous and accessible programming and pioneering work within the community. Founded in 1995 and based at the Warwick Schools’ Foundation (WSF), we work in close partnership with the WSF, The Courtyard Hereford, Drapers’ Hall Coventry, Stratford Play House and Pershore Number8, alongside music education hubs, the Armed Forces, Coventry University and the Birmingham Conservatoire. Community organisations are at the heart of our operations, ensuring all activity is designed for, and with, the communities in which we work.
Our innovative mixtape albums, which present an eclectic range of styles and often blur the lines between genres, have achieved over eight million audio streams globally. Delivery of activities for people living with dementia, visual impairment, mental health issues and a range of disabilities, affirm the profound therapeutic power of music. Our regular family concerts, school and university workshops offer us the chance to explore and create fascinating musical experiences for new generations.
Concerts across the region and beyond
We perform over 45 concerts per year in collaboration with distinguished guest conductors and solo artists, bringing the music of the world’s most celebrated composers to our loyal and evolving audiences. Our strong commitment to new music has resulted in the commission and premiere of 72 new works from composers such as Roxanna Panufnik, Dobrinka Tabakova, Errollyn Wallen, Huw Watkins and Trish Clowes.
Our themed Night Owl concerts take place in an intimate cabaret-style, in which many of the potentially intimidating classical performance protocols are refreshingly absent. New audiences subsequently feel more relaxed and can engage more spontaneously with the music. These performances are often creatively lit, make use of projections, staging, and narration, and feature a wide variety of guest artists, not only from the classical world but from other genres; while a dynamic new touring series – Swan Projects – is gaining momentum. The first of these is Earthcycle, a project, with associated educational resources that focus on the impact of climate change, featuring Vivaldi’s Four Seasons alongside a new commission by jazz/baroque composer and Associate Artist David Gordon, interspersed with 4 folk songs arranged for orchestra by David Le Page and sung by Jackie Oates.
Newly-created albums, online streaming and digital concerts
Covid lockdown was the spur for a dynamic new strand of digital creativity which is now key to our identity and purpose. Our mixtape albums -Timelapse, Vivaldi Sleep, Labyrinths and Echoes – feature music ranging from Bowie and Bach to Rameau and Radiohead, have reached the Top 40 in the UK Classical Charts, been nominated for Gramophone awards, and generated over eight million audio streams on music platforms globally. These albums are supported by 7 themed digital concerts, innovatively filmed with staging and specialist lighting, with a contemporary audience in mind.
Music in the Community
Integral to the life of The Swan, is the music we bring to those living with dementia, PTSD, visual impairment and other conditions. It is moving to see the positive, transformational effect our players have on those who attend our regular dementia friendly Café Muse in Hereford, Stratford and Southam; to those in regional care homes that have reopened post covid; and to visually impaired pupils at Priestley Smith Specialist School in Perry Barr; while the players speak positively of the reward and specialist training they in turn receive.
Key partnerships include our new residency at the Warwick Schools’ Foundation with its superb range of music-making venues and facilities, enabling us to reach into the musical life of the entire county. We achieve this through cross generational concerts, mentoring, educational workshops and students playing side-by-side with orchestra members. Also key, is our new partnership with Sense Touchbase Pears in Birmingham, exploring how to bring the joys of music to people with complex disabilities, particularly the deafblind.
Nature and the environment
The urgent concern about climate change and the impact of the human race upon our physical world, has inspired new strands in our programming and educational outreach as embodied by our Earthcycle project. In partnership with the Stratford Literary Festival, we have created a series of podcasts featuring environmental journalist George Monbiot and audio producer and science writer Madeleine Finlay. In partnership with Escape Arts and Felicity Robinson of Landscapes Naturally, we are embedding the principles of the European Erasmus environmental project PAPPUS (Plants and Play Producing Universal Skills) in our work with schools through our Nurture Nature videos for primary schools.
This vibrant and diverse range of musical activity makes The Swan truly an orchestra for all, and an indispensable and relevant part of the regional community.
