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Computer virus in a hidden code within a computer program, usually capable of reproducing itself, that is often intended to corrupt a system or destroy data stored in it. Static Infection is inspired by the spread of a computer virus throughout a network. Static Infection was composed for the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in 2004. The piece is one of several orchestral pieces concerned with the idea of viruses.

Three Pieces comprises three works written at different times over the period 2003--2005, arranged for full orchestra in January--March 2007. The first piece Intrada was written for the London Contemporary Music Group's inaugural concert in October 2005 it was initially scored for large chamber ensemble of 14 players (essentially a chamber orchestra) and I had always felt it would benefit from being arranged for full orchestra. The third piece Dance was written for the Oxford Millennium Orchestra in March 2005, and was already scored for orchestra. I revised the work in March 2007, adding percussion and harp and re-scoring some of the bass textures. The second piece, Elegy has a more chequered history as it is essentially a composite of several pieces and ideas the main bones of the work are from an organ piece I wrote in March 2003 for the funeral of a close friend. After this occasion I spent years trying to write an elegiac orchestral work in her memory, though was eventually over-burdened by the enormity of this idea. Elegy therefore fuses together elements from the organ work, with many different fragments from the elegiac sketches. The three works form a very useful fast-slow-fast form, and therefore work well as a set of thee pieces however, having wrote all three as individual pieces they can and should be played separately.

Music composed 'after' painting has featured prominently in the repertory of Western art music, yet it has received little scholarly attention as an aesthetic phenomenon. Despite certain commonalities with programme music on the one hand and forms of musical multimedia on the other, music after painting (MaP) differs crucially from these manifestations, in that the non-musical component - the painting - is conspicuous by its absence, hence its more usual treatment as a feature incidental to the music, a mere citational allusion. But what happens when the painting is treated as integral to the aesthetic experience In what ways can music reach towards this other experiential domain, and how might the seeming incommensurability of music and painting - as 'temporal' and 'spatial' media - be transcended Drawing on, among other sources, the philosophy of Adorno, the phenomenology of Husserl and Clifton, the literary theory of Iser and recent theories of metaphor (Scruton and Guck), this thesis argues that the experience of music is never phenomenally 'self-present', that it is always supplemented by an element of 'ideation' (Iser), the evocation of non-existent or absent objects. Moreover, theories of multi-sensory perception challenge the idea of a musical experience that is purely auditory, demonstrating, rather, its susceptibility to a crossed modality in which one domain of experience either invokes or proves to be dependent on the memory or excitement of another. A dynamic response theory is therefore put forward to account for the painting as a frame of reference which directs, selects and contextualises this embodied experience. These possibilities of cross-domain mapping are then explored in three case studies - Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel (1971) Henri Dutilleux's Timbre, Espace, Mouvement: ou La nuit etoilee (1978) and Tan Dun's Death and Fire: Dialogue with Paul Klee (1992) - each of which highlights a different aspect of the music-painting conjunction while suggesting reasons for the resilience of MaP within aesthetic modernism.

This commentary is submitted, along with my portfolio of compositions (and accompanying compact disk) in fulfillment of my PhD in composition. The purpose is to provide an accompaniment to my portfolio of compositions, to give insight into the works within it, and to discuss the scores with regard to their relevant aesthetical concerns and compositional techniques. I will also assess the works in the context of compositional practices past and present. Writing this commentary is slightly curious by its very nature: as the composer I have a deep and even emotional connection to the scores yet must try to distance myself sufficiently from them to be objective about discussing them. Despite the nature of this task I do come at it knowing exactly what my compositional intentions were at the time of writing the various works in the portfolio. It is also of interest that this research degree has been a process of personal and compositional development over a period of four years to what I have come to consider my compositional 'voice'. This development will be charted and recurring devices and the musical means which I now rely on in writing my music will be identified and examined. The discussion of works in this commentary will start with the general and gradually focus throughout the course of writing to the specific in the final chapter. In the first chapter I will discuss some of the more general aspects of my compositions and look at principal compositional concerns, seeking to illuminate and examine the sources from where I take my inspiration (both musical and extra-musical). In this chapter I will also assess my work in terms of its cultural context. The second chapter will look at a variety of compositional techniques and devices I use in my work (with reference to specific examples) and will put them into a context according to the canon of twentieth and twenty-first century acoustic concert music. The third and final chapter will take the form of an analysis of the three works at the core of the portfolio of compositions in this submission: Blodeugerdd for baritone voice and piano, Cromlech: Viola Sonata for viola and piano and Meddylun for orchestra. These pieces, whilst apparently very different in their natures represent the core of the submission in a variety of ways. They cover the time span of this project in its entirety: Blodeugerdd is the earliest work in the portfolio and Meddylun was one of the last completed scores. Additionally they demonstrate my ability to compose in two of the facets required by the PhD (to write for large instrumental forces and to work in large time scales). Whilst there is no long orchestral work in my portfolio the chamber works Blodeugerdd and Cromlech: Viola Sonata deal in large time scales and the eight minute orchestral concert overture Meddylun is a detail-packed score for large forces. Through applying the sort of techniques I used in writing Meddylun and dealing with a large ensemble to the sort of large time scale approach used in Blodeugerdd or Cromlech: Viola Sonata I should be able to write a long orchestral work in the future. I am hugely grateful to have been able to complete this project which allowed me four years of relatively uninterrupted composing time and permitted me to mature both in terms of my music and compositional abilities and in a more personal way. There are a variety of people whose help throughout the course of my PhD I would like to acknowledge: Firstly my supervisor Professor Anthony Powers whose advice and constructive criticisms have been invaluable to me. Other members of staff too, must be mentioned for their support, encouragement and guidance: perhaps most that of Dr. Richard Elfyn Jones and Dr. Arlene Elizabeth Sierra, although I am of course hugely grateful and indebted to the entire faculty of Cardiff University Music School. My peer group of research students also require a mention for their support, encouragement and friendship. Also a number of performers must be thanked: most notably baritone Jeremy Huw Williams who generously allowed me to write him what evolved into my first professional engagement Blodeugerdd (included in this submission) and performed the work on more than one occasion. Following Williams a variety of performers and ensembles commissioned me to write them pieces and this has lead to the many of the works in this portfolio receiving professional performances. I must also thank festival directors John Metcalf, Peter Reynolds, David Campbell and Guto Pryderi Puw for including my work in their events.

I had considered the possibility of studying for a PhD for many years, but never seriously thought it could be a reality until a chance meeting with Professor Anthony Powers on a train to London, who mentioned that I might be interested in the new PhD in Composition at Cardiff University. Anthony was one of my composition tutors when I was an undergraduate and along with Professor Stephen Walsh, had encouraged my work as a composer at a time when I was unsure if this was the direction I wanted to take. Since graduating, I had established a professional music career but after thirteen years, felt I lacked focus and direction I had also kept in touch with both Anthony and Stephen and it was these reasons, amongst others, that led to my decision to undertake the course. I am very grateful to Cardiff University School of Music for giving me a scholarship to enable me to pursue my studies without financial burden and for believing in me as a composer. The wealth of experiences during my period of study has been extensive, ranging from performance opportunities, workshops, concerts (many featuring twentieth and twenty-first century music), seminars and lectures, to being part of a lively and vibrant postgraduate community, all of which I have greatly valued. I am also indebted to Professor Anthony Powers, for his help and encouragement and to Professor Stephen Walsh and Professor Judith Weir, who kindly gave up their time to look over this Commentary. Writing about my music has been one of the greatest challenges of this PhD. Whereas composing music is a skill I have developed over several decades and studying for a PhD in Composition has, in some respects, been a continuation of this, analysing my approach to composing music and the music itself has been a new, and surprisingly rewarding, experience. Being first and foremost a composer who writes intuitively with little recourse to planning, at first I wondered how I would gather together enough information to write about my music, let alone articulate this in an appropriate way. However, I found that, after a while, I had not only amassed more written material than I needed but that the exercise was both enlightening and beneficial, giving me an interesting perspective on how and why I approached certain aspects of composing. The instinctive approach to my work has changed during the last few years. Looking back I see a gradual progression, both stylistically and visually, of the music I have written, and this is not just because I have become more aware of the mechanisms which drive the creative process but because I have taken on board a wealth of musical experiences and applied these to my composing, teaching me to question what I write and to find new and different ways of achieving sounds which I would not have previously considered. In this way, and many others, my PhD studies have provided a platform both academically and practically which has initiated, and continues to initiate, professional opportunities, both as a composer and within the academic community. Not only have I accrued an extensive collection of music which I can offer for performance but the music itself is often eclectic. Most recently, the list of works and soundclips on my website has attracted a commission and several proposed performances, both in this country and America. I have always known that a composer's life is seldom straightforward and never predictable, hardly ever financially rewarding in itself. Sometimes I question what it is that makes me want to continue writing music in a tough and competitive profession. However, the opportunity over the last few years (and perhaps in many ways, the luxury) of being able to write music intensively, study that of others and learn from a wide variety of sources within a supportive environment has been invaluable and it is this, which, together with my own underlying personal motivation, has given me the further skills to continue with and develop my future career as a composer.

The title of the piece is Sanskrit, and derives from Tibetan Buddhism (of which I am a practitioner). It is usually translated as 'wheel of time', or 'time-cycles'. The Kalachakra tradition represents a vast and profound body of teachings on the nature of time and the cosmos. Its central image is that of reality as a system of interlocking and interdependent time-cycles or 'wheels', from the cosmic scale of the stars, planets and seasons right down to the intimate periodicities of the human body: 'As above, so below'. This 'macrocosm-microcosm' time-structure is what I have tried to reflect in my piece. The piece is not meant, however, as a literal musical description of this cosmological model: rather it should be viewed as a metaphor, a parallel but ultimately musical process, obeying purely musical laws of attraction and repulsion, creation and destruction. Although Buddhism is not theistic in the conventional sense, it has a pantheon of sorts, with time personified in the form of the deity Kalachakra, a figure somewhat parallel to Shiva within the Hindu tradition ('Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds'). If the piece is illustrative in any sense then it is illustrative of the creative and destructive processes at work in the universe, but viewed here in a special sense as the body and limbs of the Adi-Buddha ('Cosmic Buddha'), the deity Kalachakra.

For almost a century composers and engineers have been attempting to create systems that allow drawings and imagery to behave as intuitive and efficient musical scores. Despite the intuitive interactions that these systems afford, they are somewhat underutilised by contemporary composers. The research presented here explores the concept of agency and artificial ecosystems as a means of creating and exploring new graphic sound synthesis algorithms. These algorithms are subsequently designed to investigate the creation of organic musical gesture and texture using granular synthesis. The output of this investigation consists of an original software artefact, The Agent Tool, alongside a suite of acousmatic musical works which the former was designed to facilitate. When designing new musical systems for creative exploration with vast parametric controls, careful constraints should be put in place to encourage focused development. In this instance, an evolutionary computing model is utilised as part of an iterative development cycle. Each iteration of the system’s development coincides with a composition presented in this portfolio. The features developed as part of this process subsequently serve the author’s compositional practice and inspiration. As the software package is designed to be flexible and open ended, each composition represents a refinement of features and controls for the creation of musical gesture and texture. This document subsequently discusses the creative inspirations behind each composition alongside the features and agents that were created. This research is contextualised through a review of established literature on graphic sound synthesis, evolutionary musical computing and ecosystemic approaches to sound synthesis and control.

The portfolio works and accompanying thesis explore various structural possibilities for involving participants in the creative process of making a musical work. Improvisation of various kinds is a common feature of all the pieces, which are designed to be played, ideally, by improvising musicians able to engage proactively with the material using their own developed, personal musical languages and initiative. I have explored the idea of ‘musician as material’ in developing the portfolio and some of the many ways in which personalised individual languages can be harnessed in the creation of time-specific works. Fundamental to my research has been the questioning of the role of the composer in developing a basis for genuine collaboration and shared creative input. In devising the pieces as frameworks for collective or individual activity, I am indifferent as to both how they might become transformed or used in the future, and to their potential for attaining any state of permanence. This is because I consider them as springboards for adaptation and realisation by other individuals and also because I consider them as means of social activity designed to generate imaginative thinking rather than as fixed entities. Various formats have been used to document the pieces ranging from the tabular in Guests and Tickbox, in which verbal descriptions of sounds of undetermined sequence are set out, to the more formal sequential notation of the pieces mutant cp, Liquorice Licks, epochal natter and olinola. The musicians taking part in the pieces will deploy a range of practices from completely open improvisation, through choosing from variously specified materials in what has been termed aleatoric practice, to the occasional realisation of formally notated passages.

This portfolio explores and defines the concept of the meta-instrument as a set of conceptual tools for pre-composition. Here pre-composition is examined and regarded as a complex set of activities; the instrumental metaphor serves to illuminate the kinship composition has with building and exploring a conceptual network of ideas and concerns which are then ‘played’. The meta-instrument is therefore not seen as a direct sonic model with which to compose but as the result of a critical engagement with three distinct areas of activity before composition takes place. These are identified as: translation, Actor- Network Theory (ANT), and notation. The part of this research concerned with translation examines how ideas derived from linguistics, semiotics, and philosophy can be applied to practice-led research in a creative discipline. Concepts derived from ANT, such as relational materiality and network building, provide a means of examining how the results of translation perform when placed in a network of relationships. Notation, as a part of composition,is then seen here not only as the ‘front-end’ of these activities of translation and ANT but also as a means of exploring the potentialities and limits of the metainstrument. Each of the works that make up the portfolio is therefore seen as a part of a continuous development of the meta-instrument, and is described within my methodology as a distinct ‘research iteration’. This portfolio consists of two main sections: a theoretical part followed by commentaries on the compositions that make up my portfolio. The scores themselves have been included in this portfolio and have been placed after the main thesis in the order of their appearance. Each commentary is seen as an attempt to retrace the processes during precomposition and examine the consequences these thought processes had. Therefore this portfolio represents a documentation of how this approach to pre-composition was formed, outlines ways in which this approach can progress, and also reveals how I have approached the process of composition as research.