Music

My music up until the early 1990's was mainly scored for acoustic instruments, although often including recorded sounds on tape. However, I had worked with computers throughout the 1980s and the advent of the personal computer in the mid 1990s saw the work becoming increasingly digital. The image above is a screenshot from a composition made with an early Apple Mac and scored for instruments and digital sound in a first generation version of Finale, the now defunct notation app. More recent works often combine digital with acoustic sounds and in some cases are multimedia works, either as installations or video pieces.

The music varies somewhat in style, but always features special interests, resulting either from intellectual pursuits (e.g. creative technologies, pataphysics, conceptual art, etc.) or from lived experience (e.g. synaesthesia, diplacusis, alexithymia, etc). It is also concerned with compositional systems that are mostly inaudible. The rigour of the system is often the main creative driver of the work, operating in a similar way to poetic constraint, sometimes rigidly applied, sometimes abandoned in favour of a freer expression. This tension between systematic and non-systematic writing often underpins the dramatic content of a composition.

I was influenced by the experimentalism of the 1970s and the work embraces non-functional tonality and minimalistic repetition. It adopts both familiar and unfamiliar modes of expression: some compositions are straightforwardly accessible, while others are more challenging in their musical language. Ian Gardiner has called them "inscrutable mechanisms", which is an accurate summary of many of the pieces. However, in certain works the inscrutability is abandoned in favour of a more direct style.

In recent years, the challenges of severe hearing loss have become a major component of my compositional approach. Being unable to listen to music for very long, thanks to diplacusis, I have gone down two different paths. The first involves facing my hearing challenges by developing new methods of composing and creating new instruments to realise them. The second involves writing in a traditional way and using my inner ear to imagine the resulting sounds.

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