Musicatlas
Music
Includes:
- Octet ‘59 for six woodwind, violin and double-bass (1959)
- Autumn ‘60 (orchestra of any instruments, 1960)
- Octet ‘61 (partly graphic)
- February Pieces for piano (1959-61)
- Volo Solo for any handy musical instrument (1964)
- Solo with accompaniment for 2 performers (1964)
- Sextet: The Tiger’s Mind (text piece) (1967)
- 3 Winter Potatoes for piano (1961-5)
- Treatise (1963-69), graphic score for any means of realization
- The Great Learning (1968, after Confucius; revised 1972 in the light of Mao-Tse Tung) for non-singing chorus
- The East is Red (1972)
- Arrangements of Chinese Revolutionary Songs (1972-3)
- Piano Album (1973)
- Thaelmann Variations for piano (1974)
- Boolavogue for 2 pianos
Life
Choirboy at Canterbury Cathedral. Studied at the Royal Academy of Music, London (1953-7) and in Cologne (1957-8); assistant to Stockhausen in the scoring of the latter’s ‘Carre’. From 1961 in London worked as a graphic artist, whence the extraordinary graphic score Treatise. Some study with Goffredo Petrassi in Italy in the early 1960s. Appeared regularly as a performer of works by Stockhausen, Feldman, Cage, Wolff etc. and collaborated extensively with the pianist John Tilbury. Became involved in improvisation (with the jazz-derived AMM Ensemble) and founded the Scratch Orchestra (of trained and untrained players) in 1969. From 1971 he embraced Maoist concepts of politically-committed socialist art; published the book ‘Stockhausen serves Imperialism’ (1974); repudiated indeterminacy, turned to a more conventional (or, less elitist) musical vocabularty and wrote works implicitly or explicitly supportive of the Irish liberation struggle. He was killed when run down by a car; the circumstances have never been properly investigated.