Category Archives: Works

3 Sunsets

Written for Sebastian Grand, 3 Sunsets is made up of three sharply con­trasting mini­atures aimed at es­tab­lishing at­mo­spheric vign­ettes and ex­amining various as­pects of con­tem­porary piano tech­nique. Each mini­ature ex­am­ines ex­tremes of speed and dy­namic in a some­what ali­en­ated, but hope­fully ghostly land­scape. 3 Sunsets was premiered on November 21 2008 by Sebastian Grand in […]

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Books of Moses

My first tape piece, Books of Moses ap­proaches is­sues of cre­ativity and the col­lective con­scious­ness. I wanted to ex­amine the pro­cess by which sym­bols are as­sim­il­ated and re-used by cul­tures and the piece de­velops opening ma­terial to­wards a new place un­mis­tak­ably rooted in the past. Sound sources in­cluded car­riers of se­mantic data such as books, […]

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non vogliono, camminano

ritorno dal nulla [re­turn from noth­ing­ness] danza degli uomini spenti [dance of dead men] come il vento sospinge le foglie secche [like the wind blows dry leaves] non vogliono, cam­minano draws its in­spir­a­tion from a pas­sage in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo [If this is a man], which de­scribes the music and sound­scape of […]

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Bodies

Two things  —  a thou­sand things  —  meet face to face; two planets, the air on either side of a door, Leda and the Swan, Hemlock and Socrates, two hands, a river and the sea. Their or­bits and col­li­sions are his­tory and life, the brushing and breaking of edges. Bodies, for oboe and piano, is about these meet­ings and […]

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Sketches in Silence

My first work to be per­formed in the UK after ar­riving there to study, Sketches in Silence is an in­tensely quiet ex­per­i­ment in per­form­ance and the re­la­tion­ship between mu­si­cians’ ges­tures and sound. It con­sists of large amounts of si­lence (in­cluding si­lent ges­tures), white noise and very oc­ca­sional flickers of pitched ma­terial. I later wrote more […]

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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.
    Full Biography »

  • Hear