ANNUAL DOUBLEDAY LECTURE - NIGEL OSBORNE MBE BA BMus (Oxon) DLitt FRCM FEIS

The Doubleday Lecture will take place at 2pm on the 28th September in Lecture Theatre B, Roscoe Building, Brunswick Street, Manchester.

Nigel Osborne MBE BA BMus (Oxon) DLitt FRCM FEIS FRSE will be giving the lecture.

Nigel Osborne MBE BA BMus (Oxon) DLitt FRCM FEIS FRSE is a composer, aid worker and Emeritus Professor of Music and Human Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. He has pioneered methods using music to support children who are victims of conflict in the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, India and South East Asia. He is currently working with Syrian refugees in the Beqaa Valley, Lebanon and preparing an intervention and training programme for traumatised children in Ukraine.

He is co-inventor of X-System, a computational model of the musical brain capable of predicting the neurophysiological effects of music, and is presently working with Johns Hopkins University Baltimore and Srebrnjak Children’s Hospital Zagreb, using music to reduce seizures among children with epilepsy and multiple special needs, as well as with Stanford University CA and others on a remote co-creation platform for disabled musicians - a collaboration with Share Music Sweden, whose Knowledge Base Board he chairs. He has been awarded the Queen’s Prize, Thorne EMI Prize and the Freedom Prize of the Peace Institute Sarajevo for his work with traumatised children.

As a composer he has received the International Opera Prize of the Radio Suisse Romande and City of Geneva, a Netherlands Gaudeamus Prize, the Koussevitzky Award of the Library of Congress Washington and the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers Award (BASCA) for Inspiration. He is currently preparing a work for performance based on life experiences of his Syrian team, to be performed by the Theatre of Voices in Denmark in July, A Short History of Polish Philosophy for the Donaueschingen Festival in October, and a film version of his opera Naciketa, with a libretto by Ariel Dorfman based on the Upanishads. He is particularly active in theatre music with upcoming productions with Ulysses Theatre Istria and A Streetcar Named Desire at the Drama Theatre Belgrade.

As a teacher he has worked at all levels of education, from nursery to secondary to post-doctoral, and taught at the Universities of Nottingham, Hannover, Hertfordshire and Rijeka, as well as visiting teaching in many institutions ranging from UCLA, CalArts and Juilliard to Peking University, where he is Consultant to the Chinese Music Institute.

He continues to be active in human rights, having worked with The Committee for the Defence of the Workers in Poland, with Vaclav Havel and Citizens’ Forum in former Czechoslovakia, directly for the Bosnian Government during the genocide, and currently on the rights of refugees. He has served as co-Chair for the Global Agenda Council on Culture and Society for the World Economic Forum.

Host or Publisher Karen Cotterill