Welcome! I’m Andrew Hugill – composer, musicologist, writer and researcher. My work explores music, listening, hearing difference, neurodiversity and creative practice. This blog is a place for exploring those themes, alongside occasional notes on composition, scholarship and life after academia.
My full portfolio is on andrewhugill.com. I also write about autism on autisticprofessor.uk.
Latest Posts
- Undertone III by Simon AtkinsonYesterday I visited the De Montfort University Leicester Gallery to experience Undertone III, a vibrotactile work by Simon Atkinson. The piece comprises a single vibrating floor, roughly 1.2 metres square and made of wood, upon which you are invited to stand, sit, or lie in order to feel the vibrations. There is nothing to hear – this… Read more: Undertone III by Simon Atkinson
- Hearing the CaféThe next time you walk into a café, pause for a moment and listen. What do you hear? Perhaps it’s a closing door, or hissing steam, or clinking cups, or scraping chairs, or animated conversations, or music playing. For many people this is just normal background noise. The soundscape tells us we are in a lively… Read more: Hearing the Café
- On Finding a New Way to ComposeI’ve been reflecting on the way in which I am composing today. It is quietly radical and rather different from my past practice. That was driven by traditional requirements to produce something that had value, expressed in audience terms by appreciation, in commercial terms by transactions, in critical terms by evaluation, and in academic terms… Read more: On Finding a New Way to Compose
- Two kinds of attentionSince retiring, I have had more time to reflect on the way attention works. By and large these days, I am able to choose the objects of my attention. When I worked as an academic, my attention was shaped by tasks, in the form of emails to answer, documents to write, training to undertake, meetings… Read more: Two kinds of attention
- On being asked: why Uspud?Yesterday I gave a paper at the conference Music and the Arts in France – 1925: Anniversaries and Confluences at the University of Leeds. My paper was on Erik Satie’s Uspud, and was basically a shortened version of the article I published in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association. It went down well, and it was a particular pleasure to… Read more: On being asked: why Uspud?
