Dave Maric is a British composer, performer, photographer and environmentalist. His work spans acoustic and electronic music for the concert hall, stage and film, alongside photography, film and environmental practice — work he pursues from a rewilding and native planting project in rural Scotland, where he has been based since 2018.
His music is wide-ranging in style, shaped by decades of collaboration with classical musicians, jazz musicians, free improvisers, folk and rock musicians, singer-songwriters, poets, visual artists, choreographers, animators and filmmakers — work that has also led him to curate numerous events bringing together varied musical and artistic disciplines.
During the 1990s Maric performed and recorded extensively as a pianist, working across jazz, rock and classical contexts — from projects with guitarist Marc Ribot to contemporary music ensembles including the London Sinfonietta. For several years he served as composer Steve Martland’s artistic assistant, and as pianist and occasional leader of the Steve Martland Band. This period also saw his first experiments with electronic music, improvisation and contemporary classical composition.
From 2000 he began composing for the concert hall, with early works written for percussionist Colin Currie, violinist Viktoria Mullova and pianists Katia and Marielle Labèque. Commissions followed from the Lucerne Festival, Radio France, Cheltenham Festival, Norwegian Radio Orchestra and BBC Radio 3, with pieces written for l’Orchestre National de Montpellier, trumpeters Håkan Hardenberger and Ole Edvard Antonsen, and guitarist Fred Frith.
Maric has composed extensively for percussion soloists — twelve works have been premiered by Colin Currie, several of which have entered the standard international repertoire for students and professionals, and many further works have since been written for and premiered by other soloists internationally. He has also performed and recorded as both percussionist and pianist with the Colin Currie Group.
His long collaboration with jazz musicians and free improvisers includes Decade Zero — a large-scale work for the jazz trio Phronesis with the Engines Orchestra — and Vicious Circus, an electro-acoustic improvisation project with composer and instrumentalist Elo Masing.
Across other art forms, Maric has produced music ranging from short electronic pieces to full evening orchestral scores, for the Theatre of Dolls, Royal Opera House Covent Garden, Channel 4, Northern Ballet Theatre, Finnish National Opera and the Bern Ballett, as well as collaborations involving spoken word, poetry, video art, performance art, shadow puppetry and dance.
His engagement with ecology and the biodiversity crisis has been central to his work since the 2014 piece Trophic Cascades for two pianos and percussion. Based in rural Scotland since late 2018, he continues to compose and work on photography, film and mixed media projects with artists, musicians and environmentalists.