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Elizabeth Liddle was born in Scotland, and moved to Canada in 1995.Music
She initially studied music at the University of York. She specialised in music-education under John Paynter, whose pioneering work in bringing composition to the classroom she spent three years putting into practice in a state secondary school. She went on to study the viola da gamba with Jordi Savall in Switzerland at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and has performed and recorded with such early music ensembles as the Landini Consort, The Consort of Musicke, Fretwork and the Rose Consort of Viols. She is a member of Vancouver’s Burney Ensemble, and directs her own group, Kawasha’s Crew.Architecture and Urban Design
In parallel with her musical activities, an interest in form and structure led her to take a degree in Architecture, and, later, a Master's degree in Urban Design, during which she worked on the development of a linguistic model of urban coding, an approach to urban development, perception, and coding that drew on her background in the performance arts, and emphasised the dynamic and interactive nature of the urban habitat.Composition
The subsequent marriage of these design concerns with her musical experiences resulted in a renewed interest in composition. As a composer, the tensions and collisions between rhetorical expression and formal structure are what have engendered her musical language - a language in which both the monodic and the polyphonic traditions of her own musical background find some expression. Commissions have included: Three Sad Songs for Red Byrd and the Rose Consort of Viols; Whale Rant for the Hilliard Ensemble; The Defeat of Ferdiad for Jacob Heringman and Catherine King, on a text by Canadian poet Daniel O'Leary; The White-haired Priests for the Orlando Consort, and its companion-piece The Limekilns and the Carpenter, commissioned for a BBC Radio 3 production "Dust and Ashes". Her most recent commission was Three Love Songs for the ensemble Virelai, premiered in Slovenia in August 2000.Music research
Her architectural knowledge and interest in such things as acoustics and proportion has also led her to practical research into tuning and temperaments for fretted instruments, work now in widespread use. Other projects have included the exploration, together with the vocal group Red Byrd, of the English verse-anthem repertoire, and an examination of textual and motivic references in Dowland's Lachrimae pavans, both of which culminated in ground-breaking recordings.Educational Psychology
She is currently engaged in a Master's program at UBC, specialising in Gifted/Learning Disabled children. Her research interest is in spatial/temporal processing in gifted children, and its possible relationship to learning disabilities, particularly written output difficulties. She herself has been released, by the computer, from the written output and computational difficulties she experienced as a child.Writing
Between these other activities, she also writes reviews and articles regularly for music journals, and has recently begun to write for children, her focus being on stories that address children's questions about the unanswerable.Publications:
- Liddle, Elizabeth. (1996) Listening to the City: a linguistic model of urban development, perception and coding, URBAN DESIGN International 1 (1), 89-94.
- Liddle, Elizabeth. (1988) Tuning. In Crum A., Jackson, S. Play the Viol OUP Oxford.
- Liddle, Elizabeth Pip and the Edge of Heaven, Lion Publishing, Oxford (in press).
