Martin Kiszko

As well as his film and television work, Kiszko's major concert works include two cantatas: Sea Star with a libretto by poet Anne Ridler OBE, and A Radius of Curves – a work with his own libretto and accompanying film – which tells the story of the construction of Brunel's Great Western Railway.

Since 2010 Kiszko has also pursued his interests in environmentalism and wrote two collections of poetry on eco themes: "Green Poems for a Blue Planet" and "Verse for the Earth" both illustrated by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park. Kiszko's one man show based on the books has been performed in China, Dubai, Los Angeles, Malta, three times in India, around the UK, and at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2016 the University of Bristol awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters for his work.

His interest in the live interplay of image and music has led him to experiment and create with Soundbeam, an ultrasonic series of beams that act as invisible keyboards in space. With each beam containing up to 128 invisible divisions, each division can become the start and stop button to turn on and project a video sequence, a sequence of a stills or trigger a sequence or note of music. His work, in conjunction with The Soundbeam Project, led to the creation of Inua, a live performance piece which won 2004 Composer of the Year (Community and Education) from the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters.

Kiszko completed his PhD thesis, "The Origins and Place of the Balalaika in Russian Culture, its Migration to the USA, and the Dissemination of Balalaika Orchestras in America with Particular Reference to the Kasura and Kutin Collections at the University of Illinois," in 1999. His research paper on the instrument, "The Balalaika – a Reappraisal", was the first to be published in the West since 1900 and appeared in The Galpin Society Journal. He later wrote the entry for the balalaika in The New Grove Dictionary of Music.

Kiszko's popularity increased as a result of introducing the BBC Natural History Unit to the possibilities for sampling indigenous instruments overseas on Realms of the Russian Bear. He successfully pioneered the technique by recording instrumentalists from the former Soviet republics at the Melodia Recording Studios, Moscow in 1991. The recordings were subsequently inputted into keyboard samplers. Later, his interest in the palette and epic scale of symphonic scores enabled him to introduce the BBC Natural History Unit to the use of Eastern European orchestras in the mid-nineties. In 2008 Kiszko returned to the electro-acoustic palette of his earlier works in the score for Andrew Piddington's feature film The Killing of John Lennon.

Kiszko's interests in film music were nurtured by veteran film composer Edward Williams, who was mentored by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and British conductor Muir Mathieson. Kiszko assisted Williams from 1979 onwards when he began work on co-producing Williams' album Music for Life on Earth for the BBC David Attenborough series of the same name. They also created a touring live performance multi-media group – creating performances where instrumentalists transformed sound and video image in real time. The group has grown into the successful music and multi-media organisation Elektrodome.

Martin Edmund Kiszko (born 9 February 1958) is a British composer, musicologist, librettist and poet. He is best known for his film and television scores.