Deus Ex Musica Composer Spotlight: Ivan Moody
Josh Rodriguez
This month’s Composer Spotlight guest is Fr. Ivan Moody – a prolific English composer and priest within the Eastern Orthodox tradition now living in Portugal with his wife, singer Susana Diniz Moody, and family. He studied music and theology at the Universities of London, Joensuu and York, and studied composition with Brian Dennis, Sir John Tavener and William Brooks. He is also a conductor and musicologist. As a conductor, he has directed choirs throughout Europe and in North and South America, especially in early and contemporary repertoire. As a musicologist, he has published extensively on the music of the Balkans, of Russia and of the Iberian Peninsula, with special emphasis on contemporary and sacred music. He has contributed to the Grove Dictionary, Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology and the Cambridge Companion to Stravinsky. His book Modernism and Orthodox Spirituality in Contemporary Music was published in 2014, and reprinted in 2017. He is a Researcher at CESEM – Universidade Nova, Lisbon; Chairman of the International Society for Orthodox Church music; and a Protopresbyter of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, being Rector of the Orthodox Parish of St John the Russian in Estoril, Portugal.
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