My friend and former colleague Peter Ablinger died today. It was not unexpected, as such, but that makes it no less sad. Peyee and I went to visit him a few weeks ago, and he was as smiley and charming and kind as ever, and seemed to be in good spirits despite the circumstances. We …
23 March 2025 marks the 10-year anniversary of “Imagining a Non-Geometrical Rhythm,” my inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Huddersfield, where I worked from 2007–22. These lectures are a lovely part of the British academic tradition. They are open, public lectures, advertised fairly widely across the community, and they’re an opportunity to formally mark …
Read more “Reassessing Non-Geometrical Rhythm—a 10th anniversary update”
The first half of 2025 is a fairly busy period of projects, including several exciting conducting projects with, among others, ELISION and Ensemble Musikfabrik. The year begins with a recording project at Deutschlandfunk with Musikfabrik for the new Podium Gegenwart portrait disc of Dariya Maminova, who I first worked with when she was still a …
It’s somehow been over a year since the last News post. The reason for that is simple: after a hefty beginning to 2023—several international trips, some really wonderful conducting projects, finishing and premiering my Piano Concerto, officially starting the new Professorship in Hannover—it was a pretty quiet second half of the year. I spent the …
First, the big news: after 15 years working at the University of Huddersfield, I have accepted a new role as Professor für Komposition at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover. I first moved to the UK in October 2007, and alongside an amazing team of colleagues we built the contemporary music & composition …
A Way of Making Ghosts
ELISION (Aaron Cassidy & Manuel Nawri, conductors), Ensemble Musikfabrik (Aaron Cassidy, conductor), JACK Quartet, line upon line
New CD Release Dejana Sekulić’s solo violin CD Temporality of the Impossible was released by HCR in February, and is now available through all the usual commercial outlets and streaming services. It includes The Crutch of Memory, along with works by Clara Iannotta, Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Evan Johnson, Cathy Milliken, and a rather extraordinary …
Dejana Sekulić, violin: Temporality of the Impossible. Includes The Crutch of Memory (2004), performed with octave-low violin strings, along with works for solo violin by Clara Iannotta, Rebecca Saunders, Liza Lim, Evan Johnson, Cathy Milliken, and Dario Buccino. Recorded on 1-2 July 2021, L’Argonne, Brussels, Belgium LUDO ENGELS Recording and EditingCHRISTOPHE ALBERTIJN Mastering Release date: 11 …
It’s a reasonably quiet time, during which I’m mostly focused on completing a Piano Concerto for ELISION and soloist Alex Waite, commissioned by the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, which has a planned premiere in September 2022. The piece, which will be ca. 25 minutes long, is scored for the slightly unusual instrumentation of solo piano …
Third verse, same as the first. It’s been eight months since the last news post, so I’m overdue for an update. It has mostly been a period of planning, rescheduling, waiting, rescheduling again. It has also been a period of resourcefulness, opportunistic workarounds, dogged determination, a good bit of luck, and some patient trust that …