Professor Nigel Osborne is a composer, community musician, aid worker and health worker of Glaswegian family origins. He studied composition at Oxford with Egon Wellesz (the first pupil of Schoenberg) and also with Kenneth Leighton, whom he later succeeded as Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He also studied in Poland, with Witold Rudzinski and at the Polish Radio Electronic studio, and has worked with many leading orchestras, ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to Leningrad Philharmonic, and from the BBC to the Berlin Symphony Orchestras, as well as opera houses such as Scottish Opera, the Royal Opera House, English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Wuppertal, Vienna, Goteborg and Hanover, including a special relationship with Opera Circus UK. He has worked widely in music, drama and dance theatre, with Directors such as Lenka Udovicki, Peter Brook, Peter Sellars, Keith Warner, Friedrich Meyer-Oertel, Jerzy Grotowski,Tadeusz Kantor and David Pountney, choreographers such as Richard Alston, Robert Cohan, Micheal Popper, Sara Rudner, Stasa Zurovac, Dan Waggoner and Merce Cunningham, and writers such as Samuel Beckett, Ariel Dorfman, Craig Raine and Goran Simic. He has been awarded the Opera Prize of Radio Suisse Romande, the Netherlands Gaudeamus Prize, the Koussevitzky Award of the Library of Congress Washington and the Inspiration Award of the British Academy of Songwriters and Composers. He is closely involved in Balkan, Indian and Chinese music and has a long, secret Rock n' Roll history.
He has pioneered the use of music to support children and others who are victims of conflict in the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, East Africa, India, South East Asia and currently Ukraine. Much of this work, including the development of a musical/bio-psycho-social intervention model, has drawn on the rich interdisciplinary atmosphere of the Scottish scientific and cultural environment. He is co-inventor, with Paul Robertson, of X-System, the first functioning computational model of the musical brain. The system made possible work with Angela Kennedy on one of the most successful interventions on The NHS Recovery College Online and has led to highly effective musical treatments for intractable epilepsies in children, developed in collaboration with Professors Michael Trimble (UCL), Dale Hesdorffer (Columbia NY) and Hrvoje Hecimovic (Zagreb). The same approach is now being applied to other disorders of the Central Nervous System. For his work with traumatised children he has been awarded the Freedom Prize of the Peace institute, Sarajevo, the Doubleday Medal of the Manchester University Medical School, and the Queen’s Prize.
