Hello everyone my name is Oliver Beard. I was born in Manchester, England and relocated to Sydney in 2009. My interest in music began at a young age with music lessons both at school and away from. I started acting and playing the guitar at age 10 and went on to attended the McDonald College of Performing Arts, majoring in Musical Theatre. At 13 I began learning the Piano and almost straight after started to explore composition, writing pieces for piano and string quartet. Over the next few years I learnt as much as I could about composition from books and the Internet. I was then (in my final year of high school) lucky enough to be awarded with a scholarship for Creative Excellence in Composition, and be nominated for the 2015 HSC Encore showcase. Also in 2015 I began to take private lessons in composition with Henrique Dib, and continue to do so now.
Composition inspiration
I started to write my fanfare a soon as I learned of the competition. I wrote the first ten seconds very quickly, knowing that I wanted a rushing and exciting intro using a suspended chord to build up tension. I had some trouble deciding what direction to go in next and ended up leaving myself very little time to write the rest of the piece. With the closing date getting ever nearer I sat down one weekend and just wrote until I had something I liked.