My composition emerges from the experimental tradition and tends to explore new forms, often where digital and instrumental sources intersect. The music has been described as having a "greatly moving ... inner mind", and showing "an extraordinary harmony between classical music and revolutionary music". My composition reflects my transdisciplinarity, combining both notated and non-notated forms of music with literary influences and computational processes.
In the early years I was influenced musically by my teacher, Roger Marsh, and by composers such as Gavin Bryars, Tim Souster, John White, Howard Skempton and Philip Grange. My work with Ian Gardiner and others in the ensemble 'George W. Welch', which I founded in 1983, was also formative. More recently, I have been influenced by a host of colleagues, students and a diverse international mix of composers, many of whom work within digital music.
There are several themes which run through my compositional work, as follows:
Island Symphony (1995) treated the internet as a kind of sea upon which drifted sounds that could be combined with real world and orchestral sounds to create a piece. Symphony for Cornwall (1999) used the internet to gather sonic contributions from schools across Cornwall and fashion them into a composition. More recently, I have developed online opera.The Imaginary Voyage (2013) deploys a novel search engine to deliver interactive multimedia compositions in a series of 'islands' through which the users travel, constructing their own narratives along the way.Rossum's Universal Replicants(2014) uses social media to convey the elements of a sung story.
At its most purely musical, this combines acoustic instruments with recorded or digital sound in surprising encounters. Thus, Catalogue de grenouilles (1987) is scored for multiple frog recordings and piano with optional instrumental ensemble; Timestretch (2001) streams sounds from the Cassini space probe into an orchestral piece; and Pianolith (2003) mixes piano with the sound of grinding rocks. A number of works have extended this principle into multimedia. The installation Secret Garden (2012), for example, uses 11 interactive iPads to combine motion-captured animations with multi-layered singing and digital soundscape into a new kind of opera/ballet.
Most of my compositions deploy some kind of system or process at the composition stage. These are largely self-devised and often ironic. The systems range from the audibly simple, such as the note substitution process of Bride, teeming with sweet to the Bridegroom (1981) to the inaudibly complex, such as the massively combinatorial Land of Lace (2013). The systems are sometimes left deliberately incomplete or contain intentional 'errors', something which may or may not be apparent to the listener. The primary artistic motivation behind all this system building is to achieve a sense of 'rightness' about the content of the finished work.
My compositions are frequently based on non-musical sources. Catalogue de grenouilles (1987), Brisset Rhymes (1990) and Les Origines humaines (1995) are all based on Jean-Pierre Brisset; Doublemain (1988) and Valse des cure-dents (2007) are based on Alfred Jarry; A Slight List (1982), Bachelor Machine (1992) and Clarinette Quintette (1980) are based on Raymond Roussel and Marcel Duchamp. Not all the influences are French (Swift, Joyce, Beckett and many others are present) but they do reflect a longstanding involvement in pataphysics and surrealism, and a broader interest in musical meaning and semantics.
The discovery in 2013 of my susceptibility to ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) has led me to a reappraisal of the surface of my work. There are many instances where an ASMR-like response is something which I have actively sought without necessarily understanding what I was doing. Pieces such as Delay in Glass (1993), Nocturne (1997) and Pianolith (2003) all contain sounds which 'trigger' the response. I have noticed that works which influenced me, such as Cage's String Quartet or Xenakis' Concret-PH have similar qualities. This is something that I will be exploring more systematically in future works.