James Wood founded New London Chamber Choir in 1981 and was its principal conductor and artistic director until March 2007. Over 25 years he and the Choir have explored avant garde choral repertoire from the pre-Renaissance up to the present day. Together with the NLCC he has championed the work of many leading composers, including Kagel, Kurtag, Ligeti, Scelsi, Birtwistle and Xenakis (whose Knephas was written for them in 1990), and has also built up a substantial repertoire of electro-acoustic works (Alvarez, Viñao, Harvey and James Wood himself).

Building on his experiences with NLCC, James Wood is in growing demand as a guest conductor and works with many European ensembles and choirs such as musikFabrik, Champ d'Action, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble InterContemporain, Ensemble 2e2m, Swedish Radio Choir, Collegium Vocale, Gent, RIAS Kammerchor, Berlin Radio Choir and Netherlands Radio Choir (with whom he conducted and recorded the première of Stockhausen's Engel-Prozessionen at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw), as well as the Tokyo Philharmonic Choir.

He has recorded numerous CDs, many with NLCC, for Etcetera (Birtwistle), Mode (Saariaho), Chandos (Bergman), Amon Ra (15th Century Flemish Music), Erato (Dallapiccola), DG (Stravinsky and Ruth Crawford Seeger), Hyperion (Lili Boulanger, Poulenc, Janacek, Stravinsky, Xenakis), Una Corda (Scelsi), and NMC (Wood), several of which have received awards.

James Wood is increasingly busy as a composer and has written several works specifically for NLCC, inlcuding Incantamena, Phainomena, Tongues of Fire (a commission from the Yale Glee Club but premièred at the BBC Proms by NLCC), and his recent opera, Hildegard, (a two-hour work for soloists, chamber choir, large ensemble and electronics based on the life and visions of Hildegard von Bingen, commissioned jointly by NLCC, Percussion Group the Hague and Champ d’Action).

For more information, visit James Wood's web site.