I am a composer.  I compose for live performance, concerts, installation, dance, media and recording.  I work with people and communities, acoustic instruments and electronic instruments, and more recently I use interviews and field recordings.  I enjoy using the familiar in less familiar contexts and am interested in the intersections between sound, environment, science and societal change.

I grew up in West Cornwall and learned piano, clarinet and violin at school. I did not at that time enjoy the art of practice.  So I started composing, preferring to make things up rather than work on other people’s music. I then studied music at Nottingham University before heading to the Netherlands to study composition with Louis Andriessen at the  Koningklijk Conservatorium.

On my return to London, I worked as a substitute caretaker/ice cream sales person at the Wigmore Hall, while continuing to compose and perform as a pianist.  Bit by bit organisations and ensembles began commissioning me, until Factory Records offered me a record deal. At this time I composed mainly for my preferred groupings of monotimbral instruments (lots of the same instruments) and commissioners included Ensemble Bash, The Smith Quartet, Nederlands Blazersensemble and Piano Circus.  Decca’s Argo label recorded these works.

In 1995 I became Composer-in-Residence with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, which changed my outlook somewhat. I then had a spate of writing for orchestras including the Hallé, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, BBC orchestras, Athens Camerata etc, alongside working with dance companies such as New York City Ballet, Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance, Shobana Jeyansigh and San Fransisco Ballet.  I also wrote an opera for the Royal Opera House directed by Jasmin Vardimon, and ‘Lost’ for Ruth Wall and Ockhams Razor Aerial Theatre.

PARTIALLY SCREAMING for five percussionists was composed in 2012 for Les Percussions Claviers de Lyon.   It was premiered at Vale of Glamorgan Festival in 2013.

This piece requires great stamina. In one sense it is about stamina and constant striving. It inhabits a world between comfortable persistence and edgy exhilaration, hence there is little time to rest throughout the piece and rhythmic precision is vital.  The music starts with all players in unison. As the music unfolds, the sound world gradually expands, other instruments are added and polyphony increases. The constant thread of unison remains in the background but never fully returns and a contrapuntal machine is created instead but with the same edgy, obsessive character mixed with controlled euphoria.

I HO RO comes from the album UIST written for FitkinWall and toured extensively in 2024 and 2025.  The show features harps, interviews and electronica.  It follows threads of migration into and out of Scotland.  It takes ancient Highland tunes from the time of the Clearances, composes a complete new work around them, interspersed with interviews from recent migrants into Scotland.

SCIOSOPHY for two pianos/eight hands was composed in 1986.   It was the first piece that I ever wrote using the juxtaposition of musical blocks as a prime structuring tool.  There are four of these blocks which are repeated, truncated, modified and generally mucked about with for four and a half minutes.

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I still wished to write for ensembles with more flexibility (and time) and became more interested in adding electronics or moog synths so worked with Will Gregory, Adrian Utley, Sacconi Quartet, Powerplant, LPCL Lyon alongside soloists such as Kathryn Stott and Yo-Yo Ma.  Then came opportunities to work as Composer in Residence with Tate St Ives before being Composer in Residence with London Chamber Orchestra.

More recently I have been working with field recordings, and increasingly in cross-art projects including collaborations with Shezad Dawood (VR at Folkestone Triennial & Natural History Huseum), Minack Theatre (son et lumiere), Ars Musica (Geography Brussels) and Ruth Wall (Uist/Harpland). I also composed for European City of Culture Umea using data from a Swedish birch tree. I enjoy performing and conducting (NYCB, LCO etc), and regularly teach or lecture at institutions in the UK, but also in Europe and Soweto.  I have won a few prizes including three BASCA Composer Awards, International Grand Prix Dance Music Award 2000, Royal Philharmonic Society Composer Award 2015.

The album VENEER is a series of songs performed by Melanie Pappenheim with my band.  I decided to write some vaguely disco-inflected songs, championing the idea of light muzac but positioned in a borderland of doubt.   A large dose of cosy respectability imbued with a hint of something darker.  I wanted to celebrate some of the positives from the initial Disco period while noting the twisted moral fragility of our current celebrity-icon-tumbling era.

SPECIES was commissioned by percussionist Joby Burgess for his xylothsynth.

This piece was written in early 2020. It states statistics of population growth, rates of change and future predictions from the United Nations.

HOOK was commissioned by Ensemble Bash for performance in the 1992 Park Lane Group Concerts.   Perversely, having been given an unlimited choice of percussion instruments to work with, I chose four marimbas as the medium best suited to the fast and rhythmic music I wanted to write. I felt that in order for the little counterpoints to come though properly the four players should perform on instruments of the same timbre and not ‘rouge it up’ with lots of unnecessary clatter. Having said that there is a little punctuating clatter supplied by roto-toms and an ironic splash cymbal.

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Shifting Baseline Syndrome is a phenomenon that is perpetuated when each new generation perceives the conditions in which they grow up as ‘normal’.  It capitalises upon our tendency to regard current conditions against a small set of recent reference points so that we do not recognise long-term change.  As each generation formulates their own new baseline, the new benchmark is established and off we go again.  It is a term normally associated with ecology and creeping unperceived environmental change. 

You could say it’s a sort of generational amnesia where we all reset our own baselines to ‘the standard’ that we recognise, only noticing changes that we ourselves experience, without taking account of previous long term change.