the music of Daniel Bath
biography
After a teenage stint playing jazz piano in the pubs of South Manchester, I went to study music at Clare College, Cambridge. There I was taught classical piano by Philip Mead and pursued my interests in religious music (gregorian chant with the Schola Gregoriana and Byzantine chant in the Greek Orthodox church choir) and ethnomusicology, making a field study of Kurdish popular music.
Having moved in 1997 to Todmorden, West Yorkshire with my lovely wife Ali and one, then two, then three, then four children, I have worked a lot in community music, choir training and teaching in the Calder Valley.
Whilst my first instrument is the piano, I also play harpsichord, traditional fiddle, tabla. Indian classical music in the Hindustani tradition with Prof. Dharambir Singh M.B.E. and am currently studying Indian singing with Dr. Vijay Rajput.
I am currently gigging with the fabulous tabla player Shahbaz Hussain, in a performance based around my own songs and some Indian classical music and qawwali.
As a composer, I am always writing for the students and fellow musicians with whom I work and am often commissioned to write pieces for particular occasions or communities. The most recent such commissions were a choral song for the massed voices at Hebden Bridge Arts Festival in July 2010, an Olympic anthem for 2012 and the soundtrack for Erik Knudsen's film, Silent Accomplice. Current projects include an opera based on Ian Emberson's brilliant novel in verse, Pirouette of Earth. (for more details about my compositions, click here)
Recently I have become best known as a choir director after one of my choirs, that of Parkinson Lane School, Halifax, caused a bit of a stir by getting into the final of the B.B.C. Songs of Praise School Choirs competition and being the first ever to sing Islamic song and on the programme. They gave a very moving performance of my setting of the poem "if you pass your night" by Jalal ud Din Rumi. (to watch it on youtube, click here)
I also play piano in the fabulous Sentimentalists
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