Michael Christie
cellist ~ composer ~ teacher
biography














Studied ’cello, composition and piano at the Royal College of Music (1975-79), where he won the Bliss Prize. As a freelance ’cellist he worked with various orchestras in the UK, including shows in the West End. His music theatre work with ensembles such as the Lindsay Kemp Company took him on tours to Spain, Italy, Venezuela and the Shetland Islands. In 1989 he was commissioned by the Royal Opera House “Garden Venture” to write a chamber opera (“The Standard Bearer”), which was performed at the Donmar Warehouse. He wrote a number of music theatre pieces for Dartington Summer Music and also for the company which he co-founded with Susannah Self, Selfmade Music Theatre, with whom he has toured in Spain, Syria and throughout the U.K.

As a professional educator he has specialised in teaching ‘cello, recorder, composition and creative class music. He was for many years a peripatetic instrumental tutor in a number of schools in North London. He has been a teacher of composition and musical awareness at the Junior Guildhall since 1998. He also led many composition projects in schools for the English Sinfonia.

A song of his, ’Spår’, was performed in 2012 at the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm, by the well-known Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, accompanied by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra. The setting of a poem by Thomas Tranströmer, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in November 2011, was well received. The song is the first of a cycle of seven songs, setting poems by Tranströmer and Bodil Malmsten.