It is very difficult for a musician to put into words what s/he believes to be true and important to their own work at this historical moment; vacuity or pomposity loom, predestining any attempt to probable failure. All I can do is list those things that matter to me now.

My first experiences of listening to what was then ‘contemporary’ music, were works by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Although my musical style has moved far away from his, I still regard him as the greatest composer of the second half of the twentieth century and his work is a constant stimulant for me. Having also worked with him as a performer, I am aware of the power and passion behind his ideas and the completely magnetic way in which he could convey them to others.

Later, other composers became important as well (some of them are listed below), and I have explored many different aesthetic principles. I am happy working as I do at the present, but tomorrow may hold new challenges that demand new approaches to composition, who knows?

Form – I prefer pre-determined forms. Not commonplace or conventional ones such as ternary form, or those developed through the evolution of tonality such as sonata form: I mean a form that is planned independently of the music that brings it into being. Rather in the way that an antique temple began with a generalised plan that was then adapted to the specific location and purpose or a modernist building will have a steel framework that is planned and built first, before the stone, concrete, glass and other materials fill in that frame and make the finished building actual. I also try to make this framework unique for each work – this is a very important aesthetic consideration as I dislike a lack of formal individuality between works. Developing a framework requires imagination. Every largescale work I attempt begins with an idea of what I hope the finished work will be. The formal structure begins with this idea and tries to find a way of articulating it in an understandable way. Considerable experimentation may be needed, and many promising initial ideas abandoned before a specific sound/note is written.

Musical language – since starting to compose, I have rejected the use of diatonic consonances in contemporary music and am opposed to reviving the conventions of Classical/Romantic harmonic practice. This is not to imply that I do not listen to, perform and love such music, but I believe that its particular language is dead, passed by historically just as is the language of pre-tonal music; for me, it would be absurd to create using Dufay’s musical language, and it is just as absurd to try to reuse that of Mahler!

Systems – a great deal of the music that I admire by composers like Stockhausen, Boulez, Xenakis, Lachenmann, Spahlinger, Maxwell Davies and Ferneyhough et al. is highly systematised, and this helped them to create many great works during the last eighty years. However, it could be argued that the time for such ‘global’ systemisation is slowly passing… I am now more interested in ‘particular’, smaller, work-specific, systems. Methods that help me devise sounds, harmonies, rhythms, structures, textures, timbres, etc. for the work in hand. My ideal is to create a timbral and sound/music ‘system’ that is new for each work. Serial thought plays an important part in my thinking, but I am far from being a serialist.

Performance – I am interested in danger and risk in performance. I like the fact that tiny accidents and inaccuracies will make every performance unique; this is one reason why most of my work uses acoustic instruments and ‘live’ performers. It is also why I rarely allow ‘free’ improvisation into my work; there is almost always a relaxation of performative tension when performers feel that they can’t go ‘wrong’ in a ‘free’ passage. Instead, I try to create situations where the performer has considerable freedom in one or more parameters while still being directed in others, e.g. I will write a passage of multiphonics for wind instruments by notating only the fundamental pitch and the rhythm, thus leaving the choice of specific multiphonic to the player/s; no player familiar with the capacities of his/her instrument will chose exactly the same multiphonic fingering as any other player in the same situation – hence, a passage of ‘controlled’ performer freedom comes into being.

In recent years, I have found Claus-Stefan Mahnkopf’s concept of a ‘second Modernity’, one moving beyond the “ending of history” stasis of post-modernism, which is discussed frequently in his theoretical texts, very helpful in trying to formulate my own ideas. I like the idea of producing highly ‘finished’ works created with as clear an intention and level of technical skill as I can manage. Much of my work tries to reflect the human world around us all, but I try to make my responses oblique, veiled, almost hidden, so that, in the spirit of Kallimachos, the listener is encouraged to think and reflect on possible linkages and wider associations, not just to become a passive experiencer of sound. Occasionally however, the pressure of events forces my responses to become nearer to the surface of a work as in the case of The Cities Still Burn and the Ash Still Falls (2022), which reflects the catastrophic events in Ukraine.