Roseanna Dunn

Biography

Roseanna Dunn is a composer, conductor and performer based in Cambridge, where she is undertaking an Mphil in composition at Sidney Sussex College, supported by a Vaughan Williams bursary. She is also a Prize Scholarship award holder at Churchill College, having previously graduated from here with a first-class honors degree in music in 2022. Through her work, Roseanna strives to actualise a post-critical, and decidedly feminist, approach to composition, using the principles of Rhizomes and Animism as fundamentals in her methodology. Roseanna is particularly interested in widening the engagement of contemporary classical music beyond the confines of the academy, and disrupting assumed flows of agency in the composer-performer-audience tripartite. Consequently, Roseanna’s projects frequently comprise multiple media, and she has a penchant for incorporating light and unconventional spatiality into her works.
Roseanna regularly embarks on creative collaborations with internationally acclaimed ensembles, having most recently written compositions for Sopriola, The Marsyas Trio and Incantati: her music has been performed in concert venues throughout Europe and beyond. In November 2023, Roseanna’s debut musical, Beyond Today was premiered in a four-night run in the ADC theatre, financed by Cambridge University Musical Theatre Society, and described in reviews as ‘a soft, sorrowful and stirring ode to the importance of queer love’. Roseanna has worked in collaboration with composer Ewan Campbell and the Bennet Institute of Diversity in the creation of Hebrides: Redacted and Beethoven 6: Extinction Projects, written for the 2022 and 2023 Wilderness Festival orchestras, respectively. She also held the prestigious positions of resident composer and conductor in the 2022 Minerva Festival.
Following her choral scholarship and music sizarship positions throughout her undergraduate, Roseanna now holds the position of assistant conductor with the Inter Alios Choir. Alongside running the Chamber Choir and regularly leading the full choir, Roseanna frequently composes repertoire for Inter Alios: in December 2022, she was commissioned to compose A Song of Christmas to mark the retirement of John Rawlinson, and her Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis will be premiered by the choir in March, 2024. She also held a resident conductor position with Cambridge University Philharmonic Orchestra from 2019-2022. In 2021, she acted as musical director on the third ever production of Philip Venables opera, Denis and Katya, as well as in the debut of Marcella Keating’s opera Two Women, Both Alike in Dignity.
Roseanna has performed internationally as a vocalist, harpist, flautist, saxophonist and pianist, making appearances in prestigious venues such as the Royal Albert Hall, Royal Festival Hall, St Martin in the Fields, the Canadian Parliament Buildings and St Mark’s Basilica. She has appeared as a vocalist on The One Show, BBC Look East, as a finalist in the 2018 season of Music for Youth as co-leader and member of a Capella ensemble Novem Consort, and multiple times in the BBC Proms. She has worked as a wedding harpist, recording artist for a number of contemporary classical composers, and has significant teaching experience in both practical and theoretical musicianship at all levels and ages.
In the coming months, Roseanna looks forward to: giving an address on feminism and composition to current Cambridge Students in January, 2024; working on a new commission for the Marsyas Trio, due to be premiered in February 2024 composing a new audio-visual work for the Fidelio Trio, due to be premiered in May 2024; conducting the Inter Alios Choir in a performance of Mozart’s Requiem; furthering talks for a collaboration with Liverpool Lime Street Station in a performance of Roseanna’s project for electronics and voice, Fragments: Liverpool.