Martin Watt (b. 1970)

Martin Watt is a South African composer and academic. He studied composition at various universities in South Africa and at the Royal Academy of Music in London where he obtained a number of qualifications. His teachers included Peter Klatzow at the University of Cape Town, Paul Patterson at the Royal Academy of Music in London and Henk Temmingh at the University of Pretoria. During his time at the Academy, he participated in masterclasses with György Ligeti and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. He made his European debut as a composer at the British Music Information Centre in London.

Watt has, apart from his academic career as a lecturer in composition and music theory at four South African universities and as a guest lecturer at tertiary institutions in the Netherlands and Germany, been very active as a composer of over fifty substantial works in all genres, many of them having been commissioned by notable organizations, performed, commercially recorded and broadcast by prominent musicians in numerous countries. He has won several prizes, such as the American National Collegiate Choral Organization’s International Choral Composition Competition and the International Vox Novus Composition Competition. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in London and an elected member of the South African Academy for Science and Art (a professional society for distinguished academics and artists).