Yesterday 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,…
The 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…
I’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…
Since 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…
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…
Last night found Simon Atkinson and me enjoying some fine beer in the Castle Inn in Leicester. It’s a wonderful old place, small with perilous wooden stairs curling down the middle. It’s next door to one of the many offices I…
The Chinese edition of The Digital Musician, translated by Prof Bryan Mighui Bi of Peking University, is due to be published later this year. I was asked to write a Preface, which is reproduced below. The first edition of The…
“The precisions of absurdity align with the adaptations necessary for autistic survival”. I wrote this sentence at the end of a paragraph in a draft of an article I am preparing about Erik Satie. Readers familiar with Satie’s writings may…
Not everything worth listening to comes from a concert hall, and not everything worth reading comes from a book. This blog sits somewhere in between. Hello, I’m Andrew Hugill. I compose music, study musicology, and spend a lot of time…
