Aaron Cassidy // composer & conductor

Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, 2007
Photo: Sharka Bosakova

upcoming performances

String Quartet JACK Quartet, Darmstadt Summer Courses, Germany. July 23, 2010.
I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips Jeff Gavett, voice, New York, USA. September 24, 2010.
Second String Quartet JACK Quartet. Donaueschinger Musiktage, October, 2010.

Second String Quartet JACK Quartet. 31st Annual New Music Festival, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, USA. October 22, 2010.

"the green is either" Talea Ensemble (Scott Voyles, cond.). Merkin Concert Hall, New York, USA. March 24, 2011.

news
Awarded Research Grant on the 'Practice-Led and Applied' Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the development of a new string tablature notation, in conjunction with the commission from the JACK Quartet and Südwestrundfunk/Donaueschinger Musiktage 2010.
Recording sessions with ELISION at Radio Bremen September 3-5 and 21-23, 2009, March 16-17, 2010. details and photos

Aaron Cassidy is an American composer and conductor based in the UK. His music is gaining increasingly widespread exposure, with recent performances in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia.

His music can be characterized by an uncompromising dedication to instability and fragmentation. The received wisdom of performance practice is continually questioned and reasserted, often with intentionally unpredictable results. His recent works have experimented largely with the interaction of a performer with his/her instrument, introducing a decoupling of component performance techniques through a variety of extended tablature notations. Fracture is prioritized in timbral, structural, and rhythmic strata in such a way that resulting aural units are themselves only the byproducts or collisions of independent (and often cyclic) musical processes. The musical score becomes, then, both the locus of processual sediment and concurrently the cause of significant deterritorialization on the part of performer and listener alike.

Recent projects have included significant research of linguistic, semantic, and spatial theories, focusing in particular on heightened states of dislocation (as in Jakobson's analysis of aphasics or Deleuze & Guattari's writings on smooth and haptic space).