Eden Longson
*16 August 1994
Works by Eden Longson
Biography
Eden Longson is a composer, arranger, and drummer based in London who creates music that combines his love of jazz and contemporary classical music into a sound world all his own. Eden studied Music at the University of Liverpool before obtaining two postgraduate degrees in Composition from the Royal Northern College of Music.
Alongside writing music for his band The Mighty Thunderwells, as well as several short films, Eden has been commissioned to write music for the 2022 RPS Henderson Chamber Ensemble Award winners Northern Reeds, the 2022 Manchester Connect Chamber Festival string orchestra, as well as the Talland Quartet for performance in the 2023 Enys Chamber Festival. Eden has also written music for the Band of the RAF College which was performed in the 2023 National Concert Band Festival where Eden was awarded the NCBF Young Composer of the Year for his work 'Topple the Acropolis'.
Eden has been chosen by the Saxophone Orchestra Manchester to be their Composer-in-Residence for 2024 where he will write a new work to be premiered in April 2024 in Manchester. Eden has many roots in Manchester, especially at the Royal Northern College of Music where he wrote music for the RNCM Wind Orchestra, Saxophone Orchestra, and Brand New Orchestra. Other Manchester outfits such as clarinet/cello combo The Off-Piste duo, the Tangent Wind Quintet, and the Rosamund Brass Quartet have commissioned Eden to write music for them. When the Off-Piste duo premiered Eden's piece 'Swimming in a Fish Bowl' in March of 2023, a young clarinet student in the audience claimed the piece was her 'favourite of the concert'.
Eden is constantly writing new music and working with various musicians, and will endeavour to make available all of the music on Universal Edition so that soloists, chamber and large ensembles can all enjoy playing his music.
About the music
As well as being a composer Eden is a jazz drummer whose jazz performance practice often seeps into his compositional output, manifesting in rhythmic complexity/groove and well as the harmonic landscape of Black American Music. Often incorporating aspects of contemporary classical music such as extended techniques and experimental/aleatoric elements, Eden's music has a firm grounding in jazz. Though his music is often be performed by non-jazz players, he likes to write the music in such a way that the idiomatic jazz style can be accessible to someone who doesn't usually play in that style.
Eden has written music for various sized groups including for Wind Orchestra ('Topple the Acropolis' or 'Filed on the Interstellar Hard Drives'), for String Orchestra ('Black Dog Serenade'), for String Quartet ('The Polar Bears of Kolyuchinn Island'), Saxophone Quartet ('MeowMeowBeenz' or 'What Sauce!'), or for Cello and Piano ('Fragments & Chaos') and Saxophone and Organ ('What Are You Doing Here?').
Eden enjoys giving his pieces fun and unique names, and writing with the enjoyment of the player and audience held equally in mind.