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Christopher Fox (born 10 March 1955) is an English composer and writer on music. [1]
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Christopher Fox (born 10 March 1955) is an English composer and writer on music. [1]
He studied at the universities of Liverpool, Southampton and York, where his teachers included Hugh Wood and Jonathan Harvey. [2] He received a PhD in composition from the University of York in 1984. From 1984 to 1994 he was a member of the composition staff at the Darmstadt New Music Summer School. He is currently Professor in Music at Brunel University, a post he took up in 2006. His music is widely performed, broadcast and recorded. He is also a prolific writer on music. In addition to concert works, Fox has collaborated with artists on gallery works, and with the poet Ian Duhig on a "musical box".
An important aspect of Fox's music is its stylistic breadth—whilst his principal considerations may seem to be with systems music and adopting a systematic approach, his music also serves a political function, is deeply rooted in the post-war Darmstadt traditions of applying psychological and intellectual models to the structure and content of music and at the same time exists in a world of diverse musical attitudes, including references to the popular arts, to historical music and to cross-cultural music. The stylistic range of his works is very aurally apparent and includes complex microtonal chamber works, large-scale modernist ensemble pieces, tape cut-up collages and minimalistic pieces for guitars and saxophones.
His writings on music have also been published widely, in the journals Contact (of which he was an editor), Contemporary Music Review, Musical Times and Tempo, and deal principally with new music, in particular experimental, minimalist and complex tendencies in American and European music. He was co-editor of Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart (1996, DACO Verlag, Stuttgart), a history of 50 years of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and of Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy (1998, Ashgate Press, Aldershot).
Alban Maria Johannes Berg was an Austrian composer of the Second Viennese School. His compositional style combined Romantic lyricism with the twelve-tone technique. Although he left a relatively small oeuvre, he is remembered as one of the most important composers of the 20th century for his expressive style encompassing "entire worlds of emotion and structure".
Impressionism in music was a movement among various composers in Western classical music whose music focuses on mood and atmosphere, "conveying the moods and emotions aroused by the subject rather than a detailed tone‐picture". "Impressionism" is a philosophical and aesthetic term borrowed from late 19th-century French painting after Monet's Impression, Sunrise. Composers were labeled Impressionists by analogy to the Impressionist painters who use starkly contrasting colors, effect of light on an object, blurry foreground and background, flattening perspective, etc. to make the observer focus their attention on the overall impression.
Operetta is a form of theatre and a genre of light opera. It includes spoken dialogue, songs, and dances. It is lighter than opera in terms of its music, orchestral size, length of the work, and at face value, subject matter. Apart from its shorter length, the operetta is usually of a light and amusing character. It sometimes also includes satirical commentaries.
Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber was a German composer, conductor, virtuoso pianist, guitarist, and critic of the early Romantic period. Best known for his operas, he was a crucial figure in the development of German Romantische Oper.
Anton Webern was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques in an increasingly rigorous manner, somewhat after the Franco-Flemish School of his studies under Guido Adler. With his mentor Arnold Schoenberg and his colleague Alban Berg, Webern was at the core of those within the broader circle of the Second Viennese School. Their atonal music brought them fame and stirred debate. Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic, expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process.
Ralph Vaughan Williams was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
Sir Michael Kemp Tippett was an English composer who rose to prominence during and immediately after the Second World War. In his lifetime he was sometimes ranked with his contemporary Benjamin Britten as one of the leading British composers of the 20th century. Among his best-known works are the oratorio A Child of Our Time, the orchestral Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, and the opera The Midsummer Marriage.
A madrigal is a form of secular vocal music most typical of the Renaissance and early Baroque (1600–1750) periods, although revisited by some later European composers. The polyphonic madrigal is unaccompanied, and the number of voices varies from two to eight, but the form usually features three to six voices, whilst the metre of the madrigal varies between two or three tercets, followed by one or two couplets. Unlike verse-repeating strophic forms sung to the same music, most madrigals are through-composed, featuring different music for each stanza of lyrics, whereby the composer expresses the emotions contained in each line and in single words of the poem being sung.
Minimal music is a form of art music or other compositional practice that employs limited or minimal musical materials. Prominent features of minimalist music include repetitive patterns or pulses, steady drones, consonant harmony, and reiteration of musical phrases or smaller units. It may include features such as phase shifting, resulting in what is termed phase music, or process techniques that follow strict rules, usually described as process music. The approach is marked by a non-narrative, non-teleological, and non-representational approach, and calls attention to the activity of listening by focusing on the internal processes of the music.
In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.
Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.
Gottfried Michael Koenig was a German-Dutch composer.
Byttering was an English composer during the stylistic transitional from medieval to Renaissance music. Five of his compositions have survived in the Old Hall Manuscript, where the musicologist Peter Wright contends they "form a small yet distinctive corpus of work notable for its technical ambition and musical accomplishment".
New Complexity is a label principally applied to composers seeking a "complex, multi-layered interplay of evolutionary processes occurring simultaneously within every dimension of the musical material".
Darmstadt School refers to a group of composers who were associated with the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music from the early 1950s to the early 1960s in Darmstadt, Germany, and who shared some aesthetic attitudes. Initially, this included only Pierre Boulez, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, but others came to be added, in various ways. The term does not refer to an educational institution.
New Simplicity was a stylistic tendency amongst some of the younger generation of German composers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, reacting against not only the European avant garde of the 1950s and 1960s, but also against the broader tendency toward objectivity found from the beginning of the twentieth century. Alternative terms sometimes used for this movement are "Inclusive Composition", "New Subjectivity", "New Inwardness", "New Romanticism", "New Sensuality", "New Expressivity", "New Classicism", and "New Tonality" (neotonality).
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.
James Saunders is a British composer and performer of experimental music. He is Professor of Music and Head of the Centre for Musical Research at Bath Spa University.
Harvey Brough is an English tenor, instrumentalist, composer, producer and arranger. Starting at the age of six as a chorister at Coventry Cathedral, and achieving greatest prominence as founder, leader, musical director and producer of Harvey and the Wallbangers, he has worked in a wide range of musical genres including classical, early music, pop and soul, jazz, folk and world music.
Neue Musik is the collective term for a wealth of different currents in composed Western art music from around 1910 to the present. Its focus is on compositions of 20th century music. It is characterised in particular by – sometimes radical – expansions of tonal, harmonic, melodic and rhythmic means and forms. It is characterised by the search for new sounds, new forms or new combinations of old styles, which is partly a continuation of existing traditions, partly a deliberate break with tradition and appears either as progress or as renewal.
Bryn Harrison is a British experimental composer. His works have been widely performed by international ensembles and he was a recipient of the 2013 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Composers. He is currently Reader in Composition at the University of Huddersfield.
He studied with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey, and Richard Orton and taught at Huddersfield University and at the Darmstadt.
