Joe Parks is a London-based percussionist and composer. In 2022, he graduated with First Class Honours from the Royal College of Music, where he was a Douglas and Hilda Simmonds Scholar.
Joe was a Percussion Finalist on BBC Young Musician 2016 and an accompanist for the 2018 Woodwind Final. He was the guest soloist on the first ever episode of the CBeebies programme Melody and Friends and featured on Television Malta alongside flautist Roland Sutherland.
Whilst at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, Joe won the Graham Cole Percussion Prize in 2016 and again in 2017. He has been a featured soloist at the Wigmore Hall and the Royal Albert Hall's Elgar Room. With the RCMJD he has played with English National Ballet and as part of the Trinity Boys Choir he has sung with English National Opera, Garsington Opera and the Philharmonia Orchestra.
As a composer, Joe was commissioned to write for The Recorder Magazine in 2019 and featured as their Centrespread Composer. His 2012 Choice Music was recorded by BBC Young Musician winners Laura van der Heijden and Martin James Bartlett. In 2018, he was commissioned to write Han for BBCYM Percussion Final winner Hyun-gi Lee.
After studying Latin-American percussion with Demi Garcia, Joe began his classical music training at the age of ten at the Royal College of Music Junior Department, studying percussion with Cameron Sinclair and composition with David-Sutton Anderson. In 2013, he joined the Purcell School for Young Musicians supported by a scholarship from the Government's Music and Dance Scheme. He joined the Royal College of Music as an undergraduate in 2017.
In addition to performance and composition, Joe has directed a number of concerts. In 2018, he directed See The Music, a collaboration between students at the RCM and the Royal College of Art, which culminated in a concert of his compositions performed alongside original artwork. In 2019, he directed The Musical Offering: Bach Reimagined, an interdisciplinary reimagining of J. S. Bach's iconic work with students from the RCM, the Royal College of Art and the London Contemporary Dance School. In 2019, he also coordinated Bach to the Future, his first engagement with the Deal Festival in Kent. His most recent concert was his 2022 A Striking Discovery: Michelangelo Rossi, an evening of little-known vocal music and world premieres of pieces by the seventeenth-century composer.
