Oliver Weeks (guitar & piano) started composing at the age of six, with the ambitious oratorio The Wanderings Of Odyseuss (sic). Growing up with an equal amount of Chuck Berry and Wagner, he fell in love with the latter in the early 80s through a BBC broadcast of the Boulez/Chéreau centenary Bayreuth Ring cycle. He also absorbed 50s and 60s rock’n’roll influences when, as a pyjama-ed toddler, he was brought along to his father's gigs at various celebrated venues in the South-West of England, including Gladstone Liberal Club (Chippenham), Marden Flexiplastics Social Club (Midsomer Norton), and Timsbury British Legion.

His relationship with Bengal’s poetry and music goes back to a school music exchange visit to Kolkata in 1996. On a return visit, he began learning Bengali and, following a chance meeting with a Baul (a Bengali mystic poet and singer), developed a strong creative and scholarly interest in Bengali folk music. At Cambridge, he wrote his undergraduate dissertation on baul-gan and Rabindrasangit in Bengal in the 19th century, and produced several classical works based on, or setting, Bengali texts, including Pakhi (Jibanananada) and Jibon jokhon shukaye jay (Tagore).

After reading music at Clare College, Cambridge, where he studied with Robin Holloway, he obtained his Ph.D in composition from the Royal Academy of Music (2007). Since then, he has been commissioned to write for the City of London Sinfonia (Grmožur, 2009), for the London Philharmonic Orchestra (The rich man being led to Hell, 2009), and for the LPO’s 2009-10 season of educational concerts (Rogue’s March, 2009), amongst others. His works have also been performed by the Philharmonia, the Endymion Ensemble (see reviews here and here), the BBC Singers and the Royal Academy Soloists (see selected performances below). He is currently working on a setting of the Romanian poet Tudor Arghezi’s Duhovniceasca for voice and large orchestra.

Oliver’s musical influences include the Second Viennese School, Mahler, Ligeti, Sibelius and Janáček, blues and folk music of the deep south of the US, avant-garde, progressive and other extreme forms of Metal (Pig Destroyer, Meshuggah, Converge, Old Man Gloom and the Melvins), Bengali traditional music (especially Lalon and Nazrul) and Hindustani classical music. He has honed to a razor-like edge an already highly-developed sense of the incongruous through heavy exposure to some of the more distressing parts of the pop and musical theatre canon, occasioned by spurts of work as a sheet music transcriber, ring-tone programmer, cover band guitarist, MD, pit band musician and amateur theatrical and choral piano accompanist.

In addition to composition and performance, he has arranged a large and varied corpus of Bengali music. He has also been involved in transcribing and reconstructing Salieri orchestral works for the City of London Sinfonia and working with The London Sinfonietta and Jonny Greenwood on performable orchestral scores of Radiohead. He also works for Faber Music writing guitar tablature and piano arrangements of everyone from Nat King Cole to Motorhead.

Much in demand for both his piano and guitar playing, he also plays regularly with:

Khiyo - collaboration with UK Bangladeshi singer Sohini Alam, the repertoire consisting mainly of Kobi Nazrul, Lalon Shah Fakir and Bangladeshi protest songs. Debut album in the process of being arranged and recorded.

He also plays guitar in the band of singer-songwriter Annalie Wilson.

“Oliver Weeks’s Nightlight for Alice weaves together a snatch of Bellini’s Norma and an old blues number into an increasingly glowering lullaby - strange but effective.” Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 22 April 2005

Selected list of commissions: