Marcus
Rock

Within music, Rock moves between chamber intimacy, orchestral scale, voices, improvisation and fixed media. Breath and friction can grow into dense counterpoint; microtonal beating, rhythmic dislocation and electronic afterimages can turn a familiar sound into something newly strange. His forms often emerge from these changes in pressure and perception, as material is exposed, distorted, shed and heard again.

His literary sequence Hanging Gardens moves among fiction, prose poetry, lyric fragments and dream narrative, returning to images until they begin to act on one another like musical material. Writing and composition share an interest in voice, interruption and recurrence: a sentence can reorganise time, while an instrumental gesture can carry the force of an utterance.

Following a background in film, Rock began composing in 2019 and studied on scholarship at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire from 2020 to 2024 with Seán Clancy and Edwin Roxburgh. He graduated with First-Class Honours, received the RBC Composition Prize and was appointed the Conservatoire’s first Global Ambassador. In 2025 he began a PhD in composition at Columbia University, supported by a fellowship. He studies with George E. Lewis and has also worked with Georg Friedrich Haas.

His commissions include works for the London Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Columbia Composers, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Cheltenham Music Festival and the Choir & Organ New Music Series with The Marian Consort, among others. He was selected for the London Symphony Orchestra Panufnik Composers Scheme and the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme, working with Colin Matthews and Mark-Anthony Turnage. He is an LSO Soundhub Associate and serves on the board of Columbia Composers.

Among the musicians and ensembles with whom Rock has worked are the International Contemporary Ensemble, the London Symphony Orchestra, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Contemporaneous, The Marian Consort, Quatuor Bozzini, Onyx Brass, Mahan Esfahani, Fenella Humphreys and musicians from Chineke! His music has been heard at festivals such as Spitalfields Music Festival, St Magnus Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, Cheltenham Music Festival and Norfolk & Norwich Festival.

Performances have taken place at venues including the Barbican, Birmingham Symphony Hall, CBSO Centre, LSO St Luke’s, Roulette Intermedium, Britten Studio, Kings Place and the Elbphilharmonie. Alongside his own work, Rock has given seminars at Seoul National University, mentors emerging composers through WECompose and has undertaken community mentoring with Britten Pears. His work also extends through international exchange and collaborations shaped by a continuing interest in physiological experience over fixed aesthetic labels.