Jackie Walduck 

 

Jackie Walduck is a composer and vibraphone player, whose work explores the meeting points between composition and improvisation, and their impact on ensemble performance. She has performed across the UK, Europe and in the Middle East, with musicians as diverse as the Philharmonia, Sinfonia Viva, Kala Ramnath, and the Royal Army Band of Oman. She composes and leads The Academy of St Martin in the Fields orchestra with homeless men and women The Seymore Orchestra. Her collaborative film score for The Dress (dir. Maggie Ford) was premiered at Cannes Film Festival (2008).

 

Currently, Jackie co-directs Ethereal World with flautist Rowland Sutherland. Both a band and a club night, Ethereal World presents improvised music from some of the UK’s most exciting players drawn from contemporary classical, free improvisation and cross cultural jazz.

 

Recent compositions include The Migration Game (2016), a game opera for Spitalfields Winter Festival, and an immersive piece in a Suffolk Woodland Sensing Nature (2017), in which a blindfold audience was led through different woodland locations to hear music created in response to the sounds of stridulating insects, birds, bats and weasels.  Sensing Nature was performed by Jackie’s ensemble Tactile, which brings together blind, VI and sighted musicians, and explores tactile composition and non-visual communication in music. 

 

Jackie completed her PhD in 1997 at City University, supervised by Simon Emmerson. She is currently Lecturer in Music at the University of Kent.