Author Archives: Chris

Rise, Ancient Song

I have been listening a lot to this motet, Adesto dolori meo, Deus, by the late-Renaissance Flemish com­poser Alexander Utendal re­cently. The rising chro­matic line that forms the basis for the opening im­it­ative entries is mind-blowing in its de­ploy­ment, dis­playing fresh­ness and in­genuity des­pite being nearly 500 years old. By the time the sop­rano reaches her […]

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Mikrokonzert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling

For a while now, I have been in­ter­ested in the edges of things: where things start and stop being, where they vanish, where one idea bleeds into an­other. This piece at­tempts to com­bine found sounds and streams of ‘noise’ that we carry with us in the back­ground of our lives  —  ra­dios, pop music, con­ver­sa­tions, re­membered places  —  only […]

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Gaza Cantos

Robert Guy’s final re­cital as an un­der­graduate at the University of Manchester took place at 14:00 on Thursday 28 May in the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama, re­peating the pro­gramme he gave in Wrexham two weeks pre­vi­ously: Max Bruch’s Romanze, Op. 85, and Paul Hindemith’s Viola Sonata in F, Op. 11 No. 4, […]

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Gaza Cantos

There is no such thing as polit­ical music. It is an il­lu­sion to think that notes  –  sounds  –  can teach you how to be­have, be a good cit­izen or con­tribute to so­ciety. Music is an ex­per­i­ence, a cel­eb­ra­tion of our ex­ist­ence, not a lan­guage which can convey meaning. Beauty can be ex­per­i­enced by everyone re­gard­less of polit­ical affiliation, […]

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Gaza Cantos @ Wrexham Arts Festival

Friend and fre­quent mu­sical col­lab­or­ator Robert Guy gave a viola re­cital as part of the Wrexham Arts Festival on Saturday 9th May, 2009. The pro­gramme in­cluded Hindemith, Bruch and a new work, Gaza Cantos, that I wrote for him.

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  • Microbiography

    Chris Swithinbank is a British-Dutch com­poser who works with both acoustic in­stru­ments and elec­tronic sounds. He is cur­rently a stu­dent at Harvard University with Chaya Czernowin.
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