Owen Underhill is a composer, conductor, and artistic director living in Vancouver, Canada.

As a composer, his catalogue includes an opera, large-scale works for dance, and music for orchestra, choir, and diverse chamber combinations including cross-cultural ensembles and early music instruments. His music has many different expressions and has been described as dense and interesting, colourful, lyrical in inspiration, exuberant and witty, subtle, and thoughtful. His compositions have been performed by leading music and dance organizations in Canada including the Turning Point Ensemble, musica intima, the National Ballet of Canada, Ballet British Columbia, Vancouver Symphony, Arraymusic, Vancouver Inter-Cultural Orchestra and Quatuor Bozzini. Underhill’s compositions are on several recordings including Curio Box on the Orlando label, Still Image on the Centrediscs label as performed by the Quatuor Bozzini, and Celestial Machine on the Artifact label.

Underhill served as Artistic Director of Vancouver New Music from 1987 – 2000, and is a co-founder and Artistic Director of the Turning Point Ensemble, a large chamber ensemble devoted to music of the 20th and 21st centuries. As a conductor, he has premiered over 300 compositions by Canadian and international composers. Since 1981, he has been a faculty member in the interdisciplinary School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.

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