Biography

Edward Newell was born in 1961 and grew up in rural England near to London. He was part of a large musical family. His grandmother was a professional orchestra player. His father, an architect by profession, was a multi-instrumentalist who played clarinet, piano and several stringed instruments and was a quartet performer, adeptly moving from one instrument to another. In an environment that encouraged the arts, there was always a piano at home and instruments around the house. After learning the recorder, a common first instrument, at around 8 years old Edward started to play cello. During his early years, he was mostly exposed to the classical repertoire but in his teens, through elder siblings and television he was introduced to rock and folk music. At school in the 1970s he was guitarist in a band and also took up classical guitar lessons. Around this time he would spend hours playing guitar, jamming with friends and family. He remembers writing the music for his first songs with a friend who wrote lyrics. As a band member in the early 1980s he played bass and keyboards and got his first taste of the creative potential of electronics and home recording.

After a break in his musical life, Edward took formal piano lessons and slowly worked towards re-establishing the facilities to record new compositions. With this recent return to multitrack recording he has taken to performing all the instrument parts himself. The first fruits of this new setup appeared as ’First Spring’ a five track collection, released in 2019. Before Covid he began preparing for collaborative live performances and, in a socially-distanced outdoor setting, has recently performed some of his short works for solo cello. He is currently (late 2020) working on a longer collection of pieces.

His current music is largely acoustic, played on piano, cello and bass with occasional use of samplers and recording effects. It develops from improvisations, often beginning on a piano or in combination with the cello. The resulting pieces, composed of relatively few parts, invoke the dynamics of a more traditional trio or quartet chamber performance. With an emphasis on textures or atmospheres there are flavours of other contemporary composers but when set against a prevailing intellectualism, Edward’s current work shows a greater leaning towards melody that is unafraid of sentiment.

Sensing this dynamic, one reviewer discerns ‘an almost medieval geometry to these pieces, but floating above the turning dancer are waves of nostalgia, each wave moving and climbing above the last one’ while ‘something profound seems to happen in the circles of piano patterns slowly looking for a way forward while the cello, painting in a different colour, almost speaks in words but always just beyond words.…’ Concieving of Edward’s music in terms of a dialogue between earth and sky, the same commentator perceives ‘a delicious counterpoint of evolving repetition and an often melancholic dance of the cello pulled skywards by a sense of growing hope…”if only”… We are often left feeling a possibility of redemption or of release from a deep sorrow, which is at the same time the beauty of our fragile lives, tapped out in slow melodic morse code which only tears can help to ease.’ These ‘are dances in slow motion, glimpses of a lovely ease, as we are reminded of times when things were in exactly the right place.’