Quick Facts
Biography
Cevanne Horrocks-Hopayian is a British composer, singer, harper and dancer. She is considered one of today's leading emerging composers.
Born in Suffolk, England and of British/Armenian descent, she trained in composition at Junior Guildhall School of Music and Drama, before gaining a first in Music from Girton College, Cambridge University, where she was awarded the Rima Alamuddin Composition Prize in 2004, the Turle Scholarship for Music in 2006, and the Gamble Prize for Research in 2006. She attended the advanced New Music, New Media course at the Britten-Pears School in Snape Maltings in 2005 and held a scholarship at Trinity College of Music in London in 2006–07.
She was part of the 2006 "Orchestra in a Village" project, led by the London Mozart Players with Fraser Trainer, that reached the final of the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards. Sound and Music (formerly spnm) awarded her their Artistic Director (then Kuljit Bhamra) Project: Bhangra Latina, in 2007., and she was nominated by Sound and Music (spnm), for the British Composer Awards 2009. She was nominated for an Arts Foundation Award in 2010; and in 2010–11 was one of the London Symphony Orchestra's Panufnik composers.
An Arts Council England Award enabled her to record her first (pop) album, 'Big Ears', which was inspired by her experience of partial deafness. She also arranged and produced Jessica Hynes's satirical pop song 'Peekaboogie' (2013).
She was composer-in-residence at Handel House Museum from 2012-2014.
She won an Arts Council England Award for her work, The Evolution of Eve (2012). In 2013 she gained a PRS award for Consortium5's commission L'envoi, commemorating the death of suffragette Emily Wilding Davison.
She wrote and performed the children's storytelling opera The Kingnapped King and the Pirate Queen for the Aldeburgh Festival Fringe (2014).
The Evolution of Eve was developed with Sveriges Radio into a broadcast aimed at young people in 2013, where it was judged one of the five best radio dramas in the world by the international Prix Marulić, hosted by HRT in 2015.
Her work has a strong visual and tactile element, which she calls "Eye Music", structuring rather than simply decorating her music.
She is inaugural composer-in-residence for the London Symphony Orchestra at Khadambi Asalache House, 575 Wandsworth Road.
She is a London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub Associate and broadcaster on ResonanceFM for London Symphony Orchestra Soundhub.