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Helen Roe                                                                Composer

Biography

HELEN ROE was born in Bournemouth in 1955. Her father was an Anglican priest, whose work led the family gradually northwards. In 1969 they arrived in Durham, where a lively interest in contemporary music was flourishing, thanks to the music and teaching of the Australian composer, David Lumsdaine. She had regarded herself as a composer since she was very young, but it was only when she embarked upon the rigorous programme of listening, study and analysis that Lumsdaine expected of his pupils that the intention was fully realized.

On leaving school in 1974 Helen went to Jesus College, Oxford to read music. She was President of the O.U. Contemporary Music Group, and conducted several choirs and orchestras. She continued to study with Lumsdaine during vacations, and in her final year also had lessons with Peter Wiegold in London. It was during her time at Oxford that some of her earliest broadcast compositions, including Ash Wednesday for piano (1975) and Die Blaue Blume, for soprano and chamber ensemble (1975) were written.

One of her fellow composition students at Durham was Nigel Timms. They married as soon as she graduated, and lived in County Durham while studying for further degrees. Returning to Oxford to train as teachers, they founded the composers’ co-operative, Soundpool, for which Helen wrote Notes Towards a Definition for violin (1981), the piece which won the SPNM prize for a test piece to be played by competitors in the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition.

Their three sons, Simon, Matthew and Jonathan, were born in 1981, 1983 and 1985. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pieces written during this time tend to be short and for small forces.

In 1986 Helen was offered a two-year appointment (later extended to three years) as Fellow in Creative Arts at Wolfson College, Oxford. She used this period to develop a new technique, best exemplified in the piano piece My Mind’s White Truth (1988), in which structures are generated by the phonemic patterns of words. Several part-time teaching posts followed, including one as a composition teacher at King’s College, London, and another as a composition tutor to postgraduates on the Performance and Communication Skills course at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

A meeting with Russell Hoban in 1989 led to their collaboration on a ninety-minute ‘entertainment’, Some Episodes in the History of Miranda and Caliban for mezzo soprano, baritone, narrator, tape and ensemble of 20 players (1990) – the first of several music theatre works.

Helen was a founder member of Women in Music, and for several years was on the General Council of the SPNM, also serving as a member of the reading panel.

In 1992 she was awarded the Gemini Fellowship for composers. This grant enabled her to write another large-scale piece, Out of the Babylon of my Anger for orchestra (1995), which in its revised form, Beyond Anger, was first performed by the English Northern Philharmonia in 1999. Eight years later, her third orchestral piece, Antigone Variations (2007), was premiered in the same place, the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at the University of York. This was a very special occasion, as it was conducted by her son, Jonathan Timms.

Her current post teaching music and French at Bruern Abbey School has led to the composition of a number of works for children, including a musical, Good Lord Holmes! to lyrics by Nigel. Gebrauchsmusik aside, Helen has a number of projects in hand, including a collaboration with the artist Barbara Freeman, and a newly-commissioned cantata on the life of St Brice, to be performed at Mansfield College, Oxford, in November 2012.

A more detailed biography appears in the Pandora Guide to Women Composers, Britain and the United States, 1629 – Present by Sophie Fuller.

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