Aaron Cassidy // composer & conductor

Photo © Ralf Brunner

upcoming performances
l.d._ p.c. (t.c.h.) Ermis Theodorakis, piano. University of Huddersfield, March 1, 2012.
A painter of figures in rooms EXAUDI. South Bank Centre, London. July 14-15, 2012. Plus additional venues in 2012, tbc.

news
“Gestural modeling and compositional constraints in Being itself a catastrophe, the diagram must not create a catastrophe (or, Third Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion).” Sonic Ideas/Ideas Sónicas. CMMAS, Vol 4 - No.1, Spring 2012.
Portrait disc of solos and duos performed by ELISION and recorded by Radio Bremen released by NEOS, 30 January 2012.
Second String Quartet included in Donaueschingen 2010 compilation CD, released by NEOS in October 2011.
Composer profile on NewMusicBox, the online magazine of the American Music Center, by Tim Rutherford-Johnson.
Major commission for a new work for EXAUDI from PRSF New Music 20x12 as part of the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad.

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).