What sort of music do I write?

When people ask me what sort of music I write, I can struggle to give a pithy answer. To mark the arrival of my newly updated website, here is an introduction to my music in 300 words.

My music is quite diverse. Some is driving and rhythmic while some is spacious and reflective. Single pieces can range from the extreme to the understated and can draw on multiple styles. Most of my music is traditionally notated and for traditional ensembles… but I once wrote a piece where the performer was asked to live their dreams through a cauliflower.

There are some common themes to my work. Several pieces “imagine the complexity of emotion held by animals beyond those we habitually attribute to them” (Limelight), and several make reference to Western Classical Music history (sometimes lovingly and sometimes irreverently). I like my music to be clear, communicative, and to get on with it (most music is too long!).

But what most unites my music is a fascination with process. My music often goes on a journey, whereby something set in motion at the outset reaches a logical conclusion later. In my better pieces, you may not be aware of this process unfolding but will hopefully feel a satisfying sense of inevitability when it does. To me, the gradual unfolding of a process in music reflects a deep truth about the world.

A mentor once remarked to me that the ostinato from Steve Reich’s Violin Phase was so perfect it was like he had “found it under a rock”. Since then, I have come to feel that what I am doing when I compose is not so much creating, or expressing, or even inventing (as Schoenberg said of Cage) but looking. Looking under rocks, in search of just one tiny, perfect thing.

I may never find such a thing. But the joy is as much in the looking as in the finding.