Compositions

This is a catalogue of my compositions and sound works, grouped by format. Each work appears once only, in the category that seems most appropriate. If you’re exploring for the first time, the starting points below offer a few ways in.

Starting points

If you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few entry points.

Electroacoustic

  • Three Rooms for Cora (2024) · 0′38″, 2′08″, 4′53″
    Three short digital pieces made from samples in the Grainger Library of Sampled Sound.
  • Grainger Gamelan (2024) · 3′27″
    Furniture and musical instruments from Percy Grainger’s house transformed into a gamelan-like ensemble.
  • Free Country (2024) · 2′27″
    “Country Gardens” drifts towards Grainger’s Free Music through the sounds of the GLOSS archive.
  • Digital Syzygies (2022) · 16 tracks, c. 60′
    An album shaped by networked EEG performance and collaboration with autistic and aurally divergent musicians.
  • Spectrum Sounds (2021) · 7 tracks, 22′
    A rainbow suite designed for different ways of hearing, listening, and sensing.
  • Nicholas through the mist (2003) · 5′
    The call of a Mist Frog gradually turns into the name of Nicholas Zurbrugg.
  • Clinamen (1994) · 10′
    Epicurean theories of matter expressed through rapidly descending scale patterns.
  • Delay in Glass (1993) · 11′
    The Large Glass reimagined as a delay process involving vases and wineglasses.
  • White Epiphany (1986) · 1′
    A brief birthday homage to John White.
  • To End, Caruso Sang Figure 1 (1984) · endless loop
    An anagrammatic sound piece based on an artwork by Mark Thomson.
  • A Worker Speaks (1981) · c. 30′
    Mr Alfred Worker’s philosophies and favourite melodies stretched into long duration.

↑ Back to top

Ensemble

  • n Little Middle Ages (2023) · 30′
    Umberto Eco’s “Ten Little Middle Ages” reimagined as a sequence of bright, strange miniatures.
  • Kelston Birdsong (2019) · c. 12′
    An ensemble of d/Deaf and aurally divergent musicians responds to bird song and to one another.
  • The Lion and the Eagle (2011) · 5′
    Sulfur and Mercury in combination: firmness and volatility held in tension.
  • Four Interludes (2009) · 29′32″
    Four passing movements of half-remembered colours.
  • Nocturne (1995) · 23′
    A nocturnal hallucination for two pianos and percussion.
  • O Pax Aetherna (1993) · 30′
    In memoriam Baron Opach, third Vice-Curator of the Collège de ’Pataphysique.
  • Uspud (1992) · 35′
    An arrangement of Satie’s “Christian ballet” for George W. Welch.
  • Kodok (1988) · 13′
    A meandering gamelan wanders into Erik Satie’s placard via strange fin-de-siècle harmonies.
  • Eastward Oh (1987) · 26′
    A spiriform cello concerto travelling from Westward Ho! to a mechanical music museum.
  • Catalogue de Grenouilles (1987) · c. 15′
    A herpetological surrealist opera in which frogs and humans interrogate their mutual origins.
  • Simon and Ennoia (1987) · 12′
    A delicate filigree of esotericism and buried melodies.
  • A Slight List (1984) · 18′
    A systematic working-through of heptatonic scale patterns and enharmonic cadences.
  • Phaon (1983) · 12′
    An intense statement of mythically hopeless love with layered delays.
  • Perles de l’opéra (1982) · 18′
    An evocation of Joseph Cornell’s work that treats one of his boxes as a source score.
  • A.SC.H. (1982) · 6′
    Scriabin and Schumann refracted through synaesthesia, cipher and fragmentation.
  • Clarinette Quintette (1980) · 26′
    Clarinet-quintet traditions reworked through systems derived from Duchamp’s Green Box.
  • Some Relish (1980) · 13′
    A pianist wanders through wild material while an impervious process unfolds in the background.

↑ Back to top

Installations and environments

  • Amorphous Isle (2013) · interactive installation
    An interactive setting of one of the islands in Alfred Jarry’s Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician.
  • Secret Garden (2011) · interactive installation
    A contemporary retelling of the story of the Fall through sound, text and virtual imagery.
  • City Soundings (2011) · installation
    A collaborative composition created with other artists from exchanged field recordings of European cities.
  • Animal Stories (2011) · installation
    Three museum soundscapes: forest, meadow and undersea worlds.

↑ Back to top

Orchestral

  • Timestretch (2001) · 8′
    Sounds from the Cassini space probe stretched and woven into orchestral textures.
  • St. George’s Island Chorale (1996) · 4′
    A grave chorale drawn from the second movement of Island Symphony.
  • Island Symphony (1985/1995) · 70′
    Looe Island mapped in sound through space, time, spirit and people.

↑ Back to top

Piano

↑ Back to top

Vocal

  • Solemn Melos (2025) · 10′
    Three settings of poems by Anthony Etherin for SATB choir.
  • Land of Lace (2013) · 13′
    A setting of Alfred Jarry’s homage to Aubrey Beardsley.
  • Les Origines humaines (1995) · 40′
    Epic settings of Jean-Pierre Brisset’s linguistic account of human evolution from frogs.
  • Brisset Rhymes (1990) · 25′
    Jean-Pierre Brisset’s extraordinary networks of puns derived from frog calls.
  • Five Poems of C. P. Cavafy (1980) · 34′
    Five Cavafy settings that increasingly home in on an individual experience.

↑ Back to top

Networked / online works

  • Frog Fizzles (ongoing) · participatory project
    A participatory composition project that treats frogs as “living scores”.
  • Symphony for Cornwall (1999) · 35′
    Samples contributed by schools across Cornwall are combined with music developed online in collaborative composition.
  • RUR: Rossum’s Universal Replicants (2014) · c. 30'
    A miniature digital opera based on the play by Karel Čapek that coined the word “robot”.
  • Logical Grammar (2014) · 4 × 3′48″
    Voices endlessly combine and recombine phonemes in the manner of Gulliver’s Engine.
  • The Imaginary Voyage (2013) · duration variable
    An unfinished internet opera based on the voyage of Dr Faustroll from Paris to Paris by sea.

↑ Back to top

Instrumental

  • Bachelor Machine (1992) · 40′
    A solo percussion performance that maps Duchamp’s Large Glass.
  • Doublemain (1988) · 10′
    Evoking Jarry’s version of Charon, as recounted in The Other Alcestis.
  • Sabotherm (1984) · 10′
    Based on a pun by Raymond Roussel: “sabot à degrés”.

Earlier occasional pieces and withdrawn works are not included in this catalogue.