Benjamin Dwyer

Guitar
(Republic of Ireland)

Benjamin Dwyer’s music is forged from an intensive amalgamation of technical and interpretative elements. Experienced at the intersection of compositional, performance and improvisational praxes, his music is further enriched through its deep immersion in ritual, symbol, literature, dance, film and the intercultural. 

As an educator, Dwyer's extensive work in these fields gives him the combined skills to create teaching environments that are fluid and responsive to the broad needs of students and researchers today. Practice-as-research is a core element of his artistic work and teaching, as is research-led practice. His philosophy as an educator is grounded in the belief that the inter-relationships of disciplines and cultures are essential to understanding human relations. 

As a classical guitarist, with an particular interest in 20th-century and contemporary music, Dwyer performs worldwide and has appeared as soloist with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland), the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic (Germany), the Santos Symphony Orchestra (Brazil), the VOX21 new-music ensemble, the Callino Quartet (UK) and the Vogler String Quartet (Germany).

As a free improviser, Dwyer is a member of Barry Guy’s Blue Shroud Band. With the Band, he has featured as a performer in the Krakow Autumn Jazz Festivals of  2014 and 2016, Frankfurt Opera (2018), and the EFG London Jazz Festival 2019 as a soloist and in the Band's 'small formations'. He is also a founder-member of TIN (the UK-based Transdisciplinary Improvisation Network) and founder-member of Coterminous, a cross-disciplinary collective (dance, music, film, philosophy) that explores the concept of 'translative epistemologies' (Nick Roth) through free improvisation. KnowingUnknowing, a work for improvised music and dance (with Helen Kindred), was premiered at London's InsideOut Festival in 2016. In the free improvisation arena, he has performed with other leading exponents of the genre including bassist/composer Barry Guy, percussionist Lucas Niggli, trumpeter Peter Evans, saxophonist Nick Roth, vocalist Savina Yannatou and violist/composer Garth Knox among others.

Dwyer is an elected member of Aosdána (the Irish Government-sponsored academy of creative artists), an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music, London (ARAM), and a recipient of the Villa-Lobos Centenary Medal (Brazilian Government). He is currently Professor of Music at Middlesex University, London.