 | This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(May 2020) |
Christopher Hobbs (born 9 September 1950) is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British systems music.
| This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(May 2020) |
Christopher Hobbs (born 9 September 1950) is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British systems music.
Hobbs was born in Hillingdon, near London. [1] He was a junior exhibitioner at Trinity College London, then was Cornelius Cardew's first student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1967. Hobbs worked with Cardew and Christian Wolff: he joined AMM, [2] appearing on two albums: The Crypt and Laminal.
In 1969, Hobbs was a member from the first meeting of the Scratch Orchestra, [3] and, as its youngest member, designed the Scratch Orchestra's first concert, at Hampstead Town Hall on 1 November 1969. [4] His early composition Voicepiece, part of his Verbal Pieces group, was used often enough to be called a Popular Classic in the Scratch Orchestra nomenclature.
As experimental music was hard to come by, Hobbs gathered sheet music from friends and founded the Experimental Music Catalogue in 1968 as a distribution centre. [5] Various pieces were eventually grouped into a series of Anthologies according to themes: the Verbal Anthology (of text-notation music), Keyboard, and EducationalAnthologies are typical. These anthologies published works mainly by British experimentalists, but also works by Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Jennings and other American experimentalists. After a few years, Hobbs was joined by Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman in the operation of the catalogue, which lasted in its original form until the early 1980s. It was re-started in 2000 by Hobbs and Virginia Anderson and was active until Anderson's death in 2021.
Hobbs was a founder-member of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO), with John White, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel, a group of composer-performers that specialised in music for toy pianos and reed organs. On the breakup of the PTO (for political reasons, as Shrapnel and Hill wanted a greater political content in the works played and Hobbs and White did not), Hobbs and White formed the eponymous Hobbs-White Duo, which lasted until 1976. He also took part in several momentous one-off concerts, most notably in a complete performance of Erik Satie's Vexations with Bryars in Leicester.
Hobbs' musical output includes his Duchamp-influenced musical ready-mades, in which found materials are manipulated in some manner, such as The Remorseless Lamb (1970), in which sections of a two-piano arrangement of Bach's "Sheep may safely graze" are rearranged by random means. His best-known work of this time is probably Aran, in which the note-to-note system is taken from the knitting pattern for an Aran sweater. Hobbs and White moved to a freely-composed eclectic style (since White had been writing piano sonatas of great charm and brevity, Hobbs began writing piano sonatinas of great length and weight). In the 1980s, Hobbs wrote for the then-new Casio electronic keyboards, including the toy VL-Tone (in Back Seat Album of 1983) and the MT-750 (17 On-Minute Pieces for Bass Clarinet and Casio MT750). He also wrote for the Hartzell Hilton Band, of which he was founder member, and for other ensembles, including the Dublin Sinfonia.
Since the 1990s, Hobbs returned to systems composition, some with an emphasis on textual content, as in Extended Relationships and False Endings (1993; systemic manipulation of American soap-opera synopses) and No One Will Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (1996; manipulation and setting of letters to the Mount Wilson Observatory). His Fifty in Two-Thousand (2000), a birthday celebration, uses partially prepared piano, electronic keyboard, and percussion in strict permutations, while maintaining a friendly, melodic soundworld. This combination of strict rigour and audience-friendly surface is typical of most of Hobbs' work since 1970, as is his use of cheap (toy or amateur) electronics. Hobbs has recently begun using Apple Computer's basic GarageBand software to write a series of pieces based on sudoku puzzles (which provide permutations of numbers and letters in a grid). This has led to a double album released in November 2006, called Sudoku Music (Experimental Music Catalogue, EMC 104, 2006). In 2009, a CD single of the twenty-minute Sudoku 82, realised first on GarageBand and transcribed for eight pianos (performed and multi-tracked by Bryan Pezzone), was released on Cold Blue Recordings (CB0033). [6]
Hobbs was director of music at Drama Centre London from 1973 to 1991. [4] He taught at Leicester Polytechnic (later De Montfort University) from 1985 to 2020. He was also associate senior lecturer in music at Coventry University from 2004 to 2022. [7]
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected experimental music, explaining why he had "discontinued composing in an avantgarde idiom" in his own programme notes to his Piano Album 1973.
Treatise is a musical composition by British composer Cornelius Cardew (1936–81).
AMM was a British free improvisation group that was founded in London, England, in 1965. The group was initially composed of Keith Rowe on guitar, Lou Gare on saxophone, and Eddie Prévost on drums. The three men shared an interest in exploring music beyond the boundaries of conventional jazz, as in free jazz and free improvisation. AMM never achieved widespread popularity, but have been influential in improvised music. Most of their albums have been released by Matchless Recordings, which is run by Eddie Prévost. In a 2001 interview, Keith Rowe was asked if "AMM" was an abbreviation. He replied, "The letters AMM stand for something, but as you probably know it's a secret!"
Vexations is a musical work by Erik Satie. Apparently conceived for keyboard, it consists of a short theme in the bass whose four presentations are heard alternatingly unaccompanied and played with chords above. The theme and its accompanying chords are written using enharmonic notation. The piece is undated, but scholars usually assign a date around 1893–1894 on the basis of musical and biographical evidence.
Howard While Skempton is an English composer, pianist, and accordionist.
Furniture music, or in French musique d’ameublement, is background music originally played by live performers. The term was coined by Erik Satie in 1917.
John Tilbury is a British pianist. He is considered one of the foremost interpreters of Morton Feldman's music, and since 1980 has been a member of the free improvisation group AMM.
Michael Edward Parsons is a British composer. Since the 1960s, when he met Cornelius Cardew and helped found the Scratch Orchestra, Parsons has been strongly associated with the English school of experimental music. He was born in Bolton and studied at St John's College, Oxford before taking up composition lessons under Peter Racine Fricker at the Royal College of Music in London in 1961. In the 1960s he met Cornelius Cardew; Parsons attended Cardew's experimental music classes at Morley College since 1968. In 1969 Cardew, Parsons and fellow composer Howard Skempton founded the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental free ensemble devoted to performing contemporary music. The Orchestra broke up in early 1970s, partly as a result of the politization led by Cardew. Parsons was among the Orchestra members who refused to be associated with the Maoist politics Cardew was propagating, and left. In 1970 Parsons started working as visiting lecturer in the Fine Art department of the Portsmouth Polytechnic and in the Slade School of Art, University College London. In 1974 he and Skempton formed a duo to perform their own works. In 1996–97 Parsons was a bi-fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge. During this time he organised concerts at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge. Since the early 1960s Parsons has also been active as a writer on music; his writings include a number of important articles on contemporary English composers.
The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton.
John White was an English experimental composer and musical performer. He invented the early British form of minimalism known as systems music, with his early Machines.
Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO) was an English quartet founded by John White in 1969 and consisted of the composer/performers White, Christopher Hobbs, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel. Although not one of the Scratch Orchestra's so-called 'sub-groups', the PTO often shared concerts and tours with the Scratch Orchestra as a distinct ensemble.
Dave Smith is an English composer, arranger and musical performer. Since 1971 he has been associated with the English school of experimental music.
Stephen Whittington is an Australian composer, pianist, teacher and writer of music.
Edwin John Prévost is an English percussionist who founded the free improvisation group, AMM.
Tania Caroline Chen is a composer, improviser, and sound artist utilizing piano and found sounds. After moving to the United States, Tania toured and performed across the country. She initially settled in Northern California and is now based in New York. She is known for performing the works of composers such as Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Chris Newman, and David Toop (recording).
The Experimental Music Catalogue was founded in 1968 by Christopher Hobbs in order to provide an outlet for new music by composers of the English experimental movement, Publications appeared mainly as generic anthologies, such as the Verbal Anthology, String Anthology, Rhythmic Anthology and the Scratch Anthology of Compositions. These anthologies featured music by British composers such as Cornelius Cardew, Hugh Shrapnel, Howard Skempton, Gavin Bryars, John White, and other experimental composers, including those in the Scratch Orchestra, but also others, including Robert Ashley and Terry Jennings.
David Anthony Ahern was an Australian composer and music critic, who became a prominent artist in the avant-garde genre after his best-known work, Ned Kelly Music was released and performed at the Sydney Proms music series.
Ensemble Pieces is a 1975 classical music work by Christopher Hobbs, John Adams and Gavin Bryars.
Le Fils des étoiles is an incidental music score composed in December 1891 by Erik Satie to accompany a three-act poetic drama of the same name by Joséphin Péladan. It is a key work of Satie's "Rosicrucian" period (1891–1895) and played a role in his belated "discovery" by the French musical establishment in the 1910s.
Laurie Scott Baker was a British composer and musician of Experimental and Electronic music. He was a pioneer of live electronics and graphic scores from the 1960s.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| Artists | |
