news

This year has been a little quiet, so it’s lovely to be making a couple of new pieces for early 2023. In January I’m heading off to the Spiel! festival in Basel with a new piece that will involve volunteers from the festival participants in the Theater Basel. Then in March I’ll be in Oslo […]

We made our first Open Scores Lab TV studio project after Covid last week, recording four new pieces by Lab members. It was great to be working with the studio crew again, and we had a fun couple of days trying out some new kit and making some sounds. We recorded two new pieces by […]

I’ve just had an article published in Contemporary Music Review as part of the volume that emerged from the Performing Indeterminacy conference in Leeds in 2017. Lovely that it is now out and available, and it can be accessed at the CMR page. The abstract is below. What’s the Point? Balancing Purpose and Play in […]

The video of my piece it is the behaviour a system tends towards and encourages that needs to be understood is now online at the Klangwerkstatt festival site and channel. There are also loads of videos of all the pieces in the festival to check out too.

The article Matt Sergeant and I put together on the mundane aspects of composing is now out in MusikTexte (173, May 2022). We’ve been thinking about the way all the things that surround what we do as composers shape what we make. So this might include what pen you use, where you work, if you […]

It’s been quite a busy few months outside of making pieces, so I’ve been glad to have a break over the past couple of weeks to take stock. The most exciting thing is: I’ve just got to the end of a notebook and have started another one. That’s how thrilling my life is. I’ve also […]

I’m doing a talk for a new online lecture series run by MUZIKALKE music school in Vilnius. The series features eight sound creatives on Saturday mornings over a couple of months, each with a talk followed by a discussion. I’m kicking the series off with a talk on some of my recent work, and it […]

I’m very excited to see that Tim Parkinson and Travis Just’s joint release TIME IS OVER is now out, and it includes the recordings we made of Tim’s songs 2011 as Parkinson Saunders in Bath in 2013. It’s lovely to hear these as I’d not listened to them for a while, and it’s great to […]

I have a chapter in the new OUP volume Together in Music, edited by Renee Timmers, Freya Bailes and Helen Daffern. The book emerged from the conference of the same name held in York in January 2018, at which I was one of the keynote speakers. The event brought together a fascinating range of contributions […]

The programme for November’s Klangwerkstatt in Berlin is out now, and includes the piece I am developing with KNM Berlin, KNM Campus Ensemble and the CoMA Allcomers Orchestra. We’re playing at Fahrbereitschaft Berlin on Saturday 13 November at 2000, and the programme also includes pieces by Joanna Bailie, Alexander Campkin and Stefan Streich. The event […]

I have a piece in Claudia Molitor’s lockdown book Hausmusik Kollektiv, published by Colin Sackett. My piece, evolution occurs slowly or not at all, was made in early 2020 from an exercise we did with the postgrad composers at Bath Spa. The piece is participatory, and features a collection of sound files that may gradually […]

The video of NTNU Sinfonietta’s performance of you are required to split your attention between different sources of information is now up on their website here, or you can watch it directly on Vimeo here. Thanks again to everyone for playing the piece!

We just screened a Parkinson Saunders online video streaming performance thing for here.here, hosted by Iklecktik. Emmanuelle Waeckerle and Harry Whalley at here.here (a project out of UCA) invited us to do a live show, but we ended up making a set comprising new video pieces (Tim) and video realisations of performances (me). We made […]

We’ve just about finished sorting out our show for the here.here event hosted by Iklecktik next week. It’s a 30 minute set of video pieces we’ve been developing over the past couple of months, involving the normal mix of speaking and moving things about on tables, but there are a few new skills we’re deploying […]

This week saw the second performance of the piece I wrote for the Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Modern in 2018 for Wien Modern. I’ve been working online with Michael Duch and musicians at NTNU in Trondheim in preparation for the performance at Only Connect, Ny Musikk’s new music festival. The piece, you are required to […]

Rodney Lister’s ensemble Time’s Arrow at Boston University have been working on online versions of some of my pieces recently and have made the videos available as below. There are some versions of people do things apart from last year, as well as some ensemble versions of my sequence studies. Great in particular to see […]

I’ve been doing a few updates to the site this week, mainly making sure all of the pages for my pieces are up to date. On all the composition pages there is a recording or video where I have them and images of the score (which can also be downloaded from the scores page, although […]

I’m reading Mason Currey’s excellent Daily Rituals: How Artists Work at the moment, and have just changed my daily routine as a result. The book is endlessly fascinating, examining the range of approaches writers, musicians, artists, and others use to get through the day having accomplished something. It’s pretty reassuring as everyone has a different […]

The video we made of Paul Whitty’s stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before is now available on the audiograft website after its screening tonight (video is also below). The piece involves working through repertoire that forms the performance history of the instruments being played, using a number of different reading […]

I’m very excited to be joining The Assembled on Monday 15 March for their streaming performance which includes my piece from last year, people do things apart. The performance is on Zoom starting at 6pm GMT and includes pieces by Pauline Oliveros and Morton Feldman. The Assembled are based at University of York and are […]

After sorting out my website, I’ve also finally made an update to the Open Scores Lab pages to reflect what’s going on at the moment with the group. We’ve had a slight change over the past year, with the previous Wednesday sessions turning into more of a weekly visiting composer talk, some of whom are […]

I’m dropping in on a performance by The Assembled from York on Monday 22 March as part of their streamed performance. As well as pieces by Pauline Oliveros and Morton Feldman, they will be playing my piece from last year, people do things apart which was written for an online video call. It’s with a […]

I just made a big theme change to my site, which took a little longer than anticipated. I nearly switched over to Squarespace, but in the end found it was possible to make pretty much the same thing in WordPress for a lot less cash and keep the amazing tech support from my host krystal.co.uk […]

Well I finally made a lockdown piece. After all the seminars, tutorials, and meetings I’ve been involved with, it seemed like a good idea to make a version of things to do which uses video chat as a medium. So last week we recorded people do things apart. I was really pleased to get together […]

I’ve been making a new series of pieces with Tim over the past month or so which play with remembering sequences of actions in different ways. The series is called sequence studies and there are five to start with. They all have sequences of instructions read by artificial voices, and we respond once each sequence […]

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra have made a lot of their Tectonics archive available on iPlayer for a few weeks. The piece I wrote in 2017 for Parkinson Saunders with the orchestra, alternate between attention and ease, is now available to view. Lots of other amazing stuff there too! Really great to see all this archival […]

Tim and I have been making some new videos over the past couple of weeks. We started by making versions of two pieces we have played a lot live: Tim’s two cardboard boxes and Alvin Lucier’s Opera with Objects. Both work well as unsynchronised independent recordings, and we just edited them together. We also raided […]

I’ve spent the last couple of days doing a little tidying up of online things that I have some sense of control over. So this includes: Updating my main website and sorting out some things that needed reformatting. So there is now a videos page that brings together all the videos I have of my […]

I’ve just added a piece to Claudia Molitor’s Hausmusik Kollektiv, a collection of scores designed for home use. My piece is new(ish), and titled evolution occurs slowly or not at all. It stems from an exercise we did in the MA class at Bath Spa at the end of last year. It presents a collection […]

Caitlin Rowley sent me this lovely picture of the remnants of with paper which she performed today with Vassilis Chatzimakris, Oogoo Maia and Robert Luzar at the opening of out new Locksbrook Campus. Really pleased it was played there as the link between the sonic and material aspects of the piece seemed fitting.

Tim and I are doing a set at Audiograft in Oxford on Friday 20 March. We’ll be doing two new pieces, one by each of us, and a new piece by Paul Whitty. My piece is called conversation with activities, and involves us having a chat while doing a lot of other things which distract […]

I get slightly obsessed with fonts for specific projects or groups of pieces and then use them for all the scores I make in a series. Over the past couple of months I’ve been playing around with some new layouts and am now gradually converting some of my shorter text scores to this new format. […]

Last week I took part in the second run of Natasha Kidd and Jo Addison’s Inventory of Behaviours project at Tate Modern. They’ve been collecting a lot of statements from artists about their studio behaviours and reframing them as instructions in different ways. In the event, visitors and participants realise the instructions in an artlab […]

A year or so ago I added a few old recordings of #[unassigned] to bandcamp, mostly the first few versions from 2000-2001. I’ve just started updating this collection and there’s a new album of versions from 2002 available now. I don’t have recordings of every version unfortunately, but have added as many as I can […]

Here are some photos of the installation if with paper in Iceland in an exhibition curated by Thrainn Hjalmarsson. There’s a great video summary below, and a review of the exhibition here. The catalogue for the exhibition is also available here. It was great to be part of the show, and thanks to Thrainn for […]

I’m off to Berlin in March for a few days as part of KNM Berlin’s Contemporaries series, which features work by an interesting selection of composers including Joanna Bailie, Stefan Prins, and Martin Hiendl. The festival is based at Uferstudios and KMN will play the piece I made for them from my things to do […]

My piece with paper is being exhibited at the Hafnarborg Centre of Culture and Fine Art from 26 January to 3 March as part of their Phonemes exhibition. A selection of pages will be made available for visitors to play with as they walk around the gallery, with clipboards to aid portability. I’ve made bilingual versions […]

Here is the video of the Transit performance of it is impossible for everyone to achieve everything they want, played by the students from the Nadar Ensemble Summer Academy for whom it was commissioned. The piece plays with the influence of individuals over a group, and the problems of managing control when decision-making opportunities are […]

The piece I wrote for Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Modern was played at Wien Modern in November, and broadcast on Austrian radio. I made a video of the performance, albeit from a long way back in the Konzerthaus. This is a short extract which I’m allowed to post. It’s from the middle of the piece […]

The French new music magazine revue & corrigée have an interview with me this month by Alphonsine Houëves, which we did by Skype earlier in the year. My French is very bad, so I’m trying to read through and work out what I said. I know how my daughter feels having just done her GCSE mocks. The […]

Here’s the video from the Nonfiguartiv Musikk performance (this is a noise music series, in a library), played by Parkinson Saunders with Michael Duch. The pieces are: Louis d’Heudieres: Laughter Studies 3 James Saunders: reaching an acceptable and stable solution Luke Nickel: String Trio No.1 Tim Parkinson: House of Common

This is the video from the Trondheim performance at Avant Garden, where we were joined by Michael Duch’s colleagues and bass students from Trondheim Music Academy. This is probably the best backing band ever. The video starts with parallel performances of my piece overlay (1) / overlay (2) for double basses and bass drums. You might […]

Parkinson Saunders had a great time in Norway with Michael Duch, and it was really lovely to work with so many brilliant people and at some unusual venues. From the Borealis Listening Club in a torrential downpour to the Sund Folkfolkehøgskole afternoon class for jazz students, via concerts at Ny Musikk, Avant Garden, and Nonfigurativ, we […]

On Saturday 24 November The House of Bedlam are playing three of my things to do pieces at the Being Human festival at the RNCM in Manchester. The group are playing a series of concerts throughout the day at 12pm, 2pm and 4pm, each including a different piece from the series. Alongside this there is an exhibition, […]

Next week Tim and I head off to Norway for a five date tour with Michael Duch. This is I think the third trio project we’ve done, following a couple of previous things as Lukoszevieze Parkinson Saunders and Lely Parkinson Saunders. Although Duch Parkinson Saunders makes us sound like minor nobility. We’re playing at Borealis […]

Summer update part three: I had a lovely time working as a tutor on the CAPPA course at Snape Maltings directed by Larry Goves. Although Tim and I dropped in only right at the end when the composers were busy finishing off pieces, it was fantastic to work with them where we could. Tim and […]

Second update from the summer: I was at the Nadar Summer Academy in Sint Niklaas to work with the students on a new piece commissioned by Transit Festival and Matrix New Music for Nadar. The academy is an amazing week of intensive work with the students, who are aged between 14-21. We stayed in a […]

We’re just gearing up for a Parkinson Saunders tour of Norway with Michael Duch at the end of October. We’ll be playing in Bergen (30/10), Trondheim (31/10), Inderøy (1/11), Oslo (2/11) and Tønsberg (3/11). The programme will be a mix of Parkinson Saunders duos, solos by Michael, and trios for all of us. We’ll probably do […]

I’m heading out to Heidenheim on 1 July for the first performance of a piece written for the youth wind orchestra from the Musikschule Heidenheim. This was a commission from Netzwerk Neue Musik through the 2017 ad libitum prize and is one of four pieces being played by groups from the school. I’ve been watching […]

I’ve just added a load of pieces from the last couple of years to the scores page, including the pieces for Tectonics and Donaueschingen. These are free to download, and if you want to perform any of them just let me know.

Here’s the video of the Ictus Ensemble concert at Donaueschingen Musiktage from Saturday, which included my piece know that your actions reflect within the group. The programme also includes pieces by Francesca Verunelli, Hanna Eimermacher and Martin Schüttler. The recording is from the third performance as some of the concerts were repeated multiple times to enable […]

I’ve been working on the setup for my Donaueschingen piece with Tom Pauwels from Ictus Ensemble this week. The piece is for eight instrumentalists, each with a table of auxiliary instruments and an iPad playing back samples through a local speaker. We’re working on the logistics, so Tom has mocked up this plan. I really […]

I’m about to start working on a new piece for Arditti Quartet and Ensemble Modern commissioned by Wien Modern for 2018. The festival theme is security, and the piece is going to explore social relationships between two unequal groups as a mechanism for generating the music. I am seriously excited about this project, especially as […]

Here are two videos of the latest piece in my things to do series, sometimes we do what you say, but occasionally we don’t. The piece uses the normal cueing system but the cues are given by audience members who step up to microphones to direct the ensemble. The first performance was by Grand Orchestre de Muzzix […]

I’ve nearly sorted out my piece for Ictus for this year’s Donaueschinger Musiktage after a few months of failing to make decisions. That is, of course, the fun part though. The piece continues the use of samples and words as cues that I began in like you and like you, and my recent orchestra piece alternate between […]

Here’s a video of all voices are heard being played by Material and OUT-TAKE Ensemble in Bath at the Ludo2017 conference last week. We chose to do it with words and objects for the first time, and it’s a format that I really like. The words were chosen by random and grouped into arbitrary sets for […]

My new orchestra piece for Tectonics is done. It’s called alternate between attention and ease and will be performed by me and Tim Parkinson with Ilan Volkov and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in this year’s festival on 7 May. There will be speaking, sound effects, noises and lots of major and minor chords.

All the Vimeo videos of my work are currently unavailable as we are just reworking our institutional subscription at Bath Spa. They should be back soon I hope.

Polish journal Glissando has just printed a translation of the short text no mapping that I wrote for MusikTexte this year. It’s part of an issue exploring conceptualism and appears alongside Jennifer Walshe’s text on New Discipline and Matthew Shlomowitz’s on automata from the original volume, as well as texts by Volker Straebel and Harry Lehmann.

The piece I wrote for CoMA’s Partsong Book was performed in the summer at the CoMA Summer School by participants in the course. The piece is for a small ensemble of at least three players, each of whom has six sound sources: a field recording played back through headphones laid on the table, a spoken […]

The new research group I’ve initiated at Bath Spa University meets for the first time on Wednesday 7 October. Open Scores Lab brings together creative practitioners and researchers in a range of disciplines including composition, improvisation, visual art, performance art, graphic design, and creative computing. We’ll be looking at approaches to score making and giving […]

I’m just beginning to work on a new piece for Ictus Ensemble, commissioned by Donaueschingen for performance at the 2017 festival. I’m at the early stages at the moment, but it will involve group decision making in a medium size ensemble of about 10 players, using a combination of instruments and other materials. Lots to do.

I’ve just finished Jennie Gottschalk’s Experimental Music since 1970, recently published by Bloomsbury. It’s a really useful book, with a ton of information about many practitioners, a lot of whom I know, and many I’ve not come across. It’s difficult to take in the wealth of detail at first reading as there is so much music […]

Alex Nikiporenko and Nick Peters’ 840 series will be on tour in September, playing in Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol. Joined by violinist Ruben Zilberstein, the programme includes the piece I wrote for the London performance, in which one thing depends on another. The programme also includes pieces by Alex, Nick, Jennifer Walshe, Laurie Tompkins, Michael Baldwin, Vitalija Glovackyte, […]

I’ve just finished a new piece commissioned by James Weeks and CoMA for the CoMA Partsong Book. It’s the first time I’ve made a piece directly for CoMA, and am looking forward to hearing how it goes this year. It’s a group behaviour piece, and the title – constant interchange of the most various kinds – is drawn […]

Daniil Pilchen and Alexey Zaitsev performed lots and lot for us to do at Sound Museum, St Petersburg on 24 July in what is one of the most extreme versions of the things to do pieces so far. Their very measured performance takes a totally different approach to the more frantic and pressured performances that have taken […]

IMD and NEOS have just released the fourth edition of their Darmstadt Aural Documents series. Volume 4 focuses on music for piano performed at the Ferienkurse from the 1950s to the present, and includes my piece #070702 performed by Nic Hodges. The piece is for piano with ebows, and I slightly misjudged the need for […]

I’m working on a new piece for BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the moment for next year’s Tectonics festival in Glasgow, curated by Ilan Volkov. It will be played at the festival in May, and I’m currently thinking about ways to organise large groups of people. Most of the pieces I’ve made over the past […]

Well we survived our live radio experience on Drivetime Underground yesterday and had a lovely time with Neil and Joseph the engineer. It’s quite a tight space in the Resonance FM studio, and it’s the first time in a while we’ve crammed everything onto one table, but it just about fit. Quite a lot ended […]

This Saturday Tim and I are guests on Neil Luck’s Drivetime Underground show on Resonance FM. We’ll be playing some of Tim’s songs, and answering questions. I think. The lineup for the whole series is great, and I’m just about to listen to episodes one and two, which included Lore Lixenberg, Adam de la Cour, and […]

MusikTexte have just published my short statement on mapping in their latest issue. It is part of a group of texts requested by Jennifer Walshe that deal with physical, theatrical and visual elements in recent music. My text is a response to some recent work which maps data to pitch and duration (mostly), or visual […]

Tim and I are playing in Basel on Saturday 14 May at Christoph Schiller’s atelier concert series. Very excited to be doing Tim’s Opus 1 from Time with People again, as well as the pieces John White and Matteo Fargion wrote for use a couple of years ago. Alongside these pieces we’re doing Louis d’Heudieres’ excellent […]

Last week my new piece reassigned #1 was performed at the first ddmmyy series event in London, 210416|JS#r1|Ltpor/bot|TPsfm|JW/ajftggb|JSripcm2016|JFcm2 (and that seems to have messed up WordPress formatting). I was extremely disappointed not to be able to make it but logistics my end made it impossible. The performance sounds great though, and everyone did a very good job, […]

On Friday my new piece they are always different, they are always the same was performed in Bagnolet, Paris, by children from Ecole Paul-Langevin directed by Thierry Madiot. The piece was commissioned by Lutherie Urbaine  and Conservatoire de Musique Erik Satie as part of their ongoing work with local schools. It’s an amazing initiative: they work with […]

Tempo have just published the extended remix of the interview I did with Dominic Lash recently. The original interview took place at Dom’s house in Bristol in May 2015 and was published on the another timbre website to coincide with the release of the recording of assigned #15. We picked up where we left off a […]

Charlie Sdraulig has just sent me the video of his duo with Weston Olencki, people making sounds, performing lots and lots for us to do a couple of times in February. The performances were at CCRMA at Stanford and Center for New Music in San Francisco. This is the second time the piece has been performed, […]

I made a post over Christmas that begins to think think through the #[unassigned] project that I worked on from 2000-2009. I wanted to go back over my notebooks, sketches, scores and recordings to piece together how I made the different versions. So I started with #051000, which is the first proper version of #[unassigned] and […]

Jack Sheen interviewed me on Monday in advance of the ddmmyy performance of a new piece, reassigned #1, in his series on 21 April. I was a little groggy with a cold, but it doesn’t [sniffs] come across in the text [splutters]. You can read the interview here

Here is the final piece from Decontamination 6 at RNCM last week. Distractfold are joined by The House of Bedlam and RNCM Electric Experimental Ensemble for the first performance of we gradually have more things to do and fewer things to say. As Larry Goves noted, it’s a bit like bingo. Thanks to Larry and Mauricio […]

This is the video of the first performance of all voices are heard using pitches. I’ve copied the video of the original performance with word lists as a comparison. There are some striking differences in the way that the phrases coalesce.

And here’s the performance by Rocío Bolaños and Linda Jankowska from Distractfold at Decontamination 6 at the RNCM on 8 March. More information in this post.

Here’s the video of Nicholas Peters and Ruben Zilberstein performing my new piece in which one thing depends on another for the first time at 840 in London last week. I’ve written about this and Distractfold’s version a couple of days later in this post.

Raphael Smarzoch has just made a programme for SWR2 Now Music on verbal notation to which I contributed. It includes lots of scores – interesting to hear them read out loud – and excerpts from realisations. I’m one of the commentators, along with Joseph Kudirka, Nomi Epstein, Pauline Oliveros and Ross Parfitt, and there’s a […]

I’ve got a few performances coming up over the next few weeks, including some new pieces. Last week Weston Olencki and Charlie Sdraulig’s new duo people making sounds played lots and lots for us to do a couple of times in California. In March in which one thing depends on another is being played by Ruben Zilberstein and Alex […]

Luke Nickel has spent the past couple of months making a realisation of my piece overlay (with transience). The piece asks the performer to make a specified number of sounds throughout a 15-minute duration. The performer makes many additional recordings over a period of months, each time attempting to match what was played the first time, but without […]