This thesis focuses upon how the use of aleatoricism can be used in electro-acoustic music to increase the perceived connection between the electronic and acoustic forces in performance. It also considers how the tools that a composer uses to create their work can enforce an influence upon their own creative process. These issues stem from research conducted early in the project investigating mapping strategies applied to composition for physical gesture capture devices. The thesis progresses by exploring performer freedom for both electronic and acoustic performers which includes examination of the use of different methods of scoring in order to transmit the composer's ideas. The approach is then considered in isolation from electronics with purely acoustic ensembles before exploring the use of recording as a compositional technique alongside indeterminate performance. All of these issues are explored within the context of my own practice, while simultaneously highlighting my overall compositional approach and how it is informed by this research. The thesis consists of two volumes. The first presents a portfolio of compositions that explore varying approaches to composition for various ensembles. The second volume consists of a written commentary that explores the context, themes and motivations for the compositions in the first.

Historically informed performance of French organ music from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries can be a difficult thing to achieve on a non-French instrument. Discrepancies in general organ character and specific stop timbre, the organ's location within the building, and issues of console management are all areas which need addressing when playing on an instrument which is not of the style and layout of a typical Cavaillé-Coll organ. This study will explore the issues connected with the realisation of an historically informed performance of such a work on a modern British instrument. Connected with explicit issues such as registration, adapted tempi and educated amendments to the score, areas including the underlying influences composers were exposed to are considered. Included amongst these are the renaissance in interest and use of plainchant at the time, the striving for a corpus of French organ works to rival that of the German Baroque, and the impact the orgue symphonique had upon a generation of composers starting with César Franck, passing through Charles-Marie Widor and Louis Vierne, and moving on to the next generation seen in composers such as Maurice Duruflé and Olivier Messiaen. As an example of how these elements can be addressed and integrated within a specific piece, Duruflé's Prélude, adagio et choral varié sur le thème du 'Veni creator' Op. 4 is explored. In addition to the issues outlined above, this work's role within his early recital programming and how it reflects his musical genealogy and influences is examined. Contrasting performances of the work (including Duruflé's own and one on a typical British organ) are scrutinised and used to support points discussed. Finally, the outcomes of this study are used to inform a performance of this work as part of the recital element of this study. The full programme is a recreation of one Duruflé gave in Louviers in 1926. Central to this was a performance of his recently composed Variations sur le Veni creator, the first performed incarnation of what was to become his Op. 4. The original programme further enlightens a study of the influences Duruflé was exposed to not least as it includes works by his immediate French forebears, as well as music by composers of the French and German Baroque.

The research presented in this thesis was motivated by my own need as a composer to position my work within the broadening of artistic practice that has become a significant aspect of the contemporary music scene. Roughly speaking, this research consists of two interconnected topics: the nature of the complex relationship between reality and the means we have to record it, and a rethinking of the audio visual correlations that might arise as a result of such an investigation into the workings of media. Through the study of these two topics, further important issues will be brought to light such as the distinction between discrete and continuous recording methods, ideas of medial loss, intermedia, and the role that we ourselves play in the development and consumption of media, and as makers and spectators of artworks that use media. I will investigate these questions through my own artistic work. This work, as befits the research topic, employs a variety of formats including some, such as film and audio-visual installation which I have never used before. As a counterpoint to my portfolio I have chosen to examine a carefully selected set of pieces by other artists, also in a variety of media, that taken as a whole help to outline the artistic and theoretical territory to be studied. The investigations of my own work as well as of these case studies are knitted together with theory drawn from a wide range of sources including psychology, science, art, media and music theory, in addition to ideas gleaned from fiction, in order to form the basis of the written part of my thesis. The text is divided into an introductory chapter, three main chapters and a concluding chapter, and has a quasi-historical trajectory starting with the long-exposure that characterized early photography, moving through the single short sample, to the stringing of these samples together into film and digital audio. The fourth chapter concerns sound film, synchronisation and the FT domain, and explores what happens when we put sound and image together, or try to imagine one through the lens of the other. The concluding chapter deals with recent developments in media technology such as high film frame rates and the domination of the digital world, and examines the problematics associated with these developments.

This study presents the curating composer as a new role in twenty-first century music making. It transfers and constructively applies curatorial language, methodology and strategies from the discipline of visual arts into the musical domain. The methodology is creative practice and a written commentary. There are two research outcomes: ‘Blank Canvas 17’ is a single-author exhibition platform for new music; and ‘bloom’ is a new body of non-classical music presented as a composite public outcome in six manifestations. In each of the outcomes I construct the role of the curator in music and demonstrate an inter-relationship between the mode of production and an expanded mode of exhibition. I also provide the first outline of nonclassical music that has developed within the independent classical scene (indieclassical) in London since 2003. The research context extends to contemporary visual culture and the supervisible roles of the curator and artist-curator or curartist as independent exhibition makers. I also examine a selection of historical activity to reveal proto-curating practices associated with the public presentation of new music. These include Andy Warhol’s ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitable’; early minimalism associated with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass; and experimentalism and pirate radio in the UK.

This thesis examines the activity of the British musicians developing a practice of freely improvised music in the mid- to late-1960s, in conjunction with that of a group of British composers and performers contemporaneously exploring experimental possibilities within composed music; it investigates how these practices overlapped and interpenetrated for a period. The thesis identifies those characteristics of improvisation and experimentalism which favour a relationship between the two fields, but which ultimately underline the different expectations and objectives underlying each activity. The historical material is explored through a combination of archive research and interviews with musicians who were actively involved in the developments under examination. In addition the author draws upon his extensive personal experience as an improvising musician and composer, and as a performing associate of several of the key improvising musicians of the period. The first section of the thesis identifies the historical and social background, outlining the two key groups of participants working in the unmapped area between existing idiomatic improvisation and experimental composition practice, including brief studies of important figures who initiated or facilitated the exploration of shared activity during the period. A second section seeks to introduce further precision into discussion of improvised music by seeking to clarify the definition of taxonomic terms currently in use, and to extend these by identifying key characteristics of the wide range of approaches to playing improvised music. Section three explores the practical implications of the differing objectives of improvising musicians and composers. A series of archive case studies examining composing for improvising musicians during the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, along with an investigation of issues raised by the restoration of Derek Bailey’s Ping (prob. 1967/8) for contemporary performance by improvising musicians. The final section identifies fundamental differences of aspiration and approach within improvisation and composition, and examines the consequent implications for joint practice. It establishes why such differences are inevitable, and the insights they provide into the nature of artistic practice.

My work as a composer over the course of my PhD studies has focused on developing novel approaches to the notion of ‘line’ in music. This portfolio of compositions, composed between 2013 and 2017, is accompanied by a commentary that presents the conceptual ideas underlying my work with lines, from both a technical and aesthetic perspective. In this approach, the most novel element resides in the fact that lines function here often not as metaphor but as literal objects. Throughout the text a range of different conceptions of lines are presented, providing a contextual and explanatory panorama for the compositional work. A line is understood in this context as a sustained sound that changes at a slow but perceptible rate, its ‘line-ness’ defined principally by its continual and smooth character. The approach undertaken consists of first conceiving lines as single entities, thoroughly exploring aspects such as their materiality, physicality, plasticity and fragmentability, in which their objective quality is gradually revealed and exploited further compositionally. The commentary is divided roughly in half, initially proposing a series of types or families of lines, and then moving on to discuss the behaviour of those lines and the ways in which lines can be organized compositionally. First, various linemodels are addressed, including the geological-line, the polychromatic-line, the thread-line, and the drawing-line, each typified in relation to a particular piece from the portfolio. I then present the idea of the ‘pixelation’ of lines from both vertical and horizontal perspectives, unveiling the extended resonant potential of fragmented lines. Later, certain combinatorial possibilities are pursued, giving rise to emergent behaviours of blurriness or in fluid-like textures characterized by permeability and motion. Throughout, I contextualize these musical approaches with references to other disciplines—especially the visual arts—helping to illustrate the ideas and concepts presented.

To play an instrument in a way that is considered “vocal” has been an emblem of artistry for instrumental musicians in the Western classical tradition for centuries. Despite the ubiquity of vocal references in the talk and texts produced within this community, there is little consensus as to what vocality means for instrumental musicians, and few questions are asked of those who claim to advocate for a vocal style of playing. Whilst vocality for instrumentalists has been dealt with in existing scholarship through discussion about the emulation of specific techniques such as vibrato and portamento, by investigating the principles of rhetoric and their relationship to temporal and articulatory issues, and in philosophical commentary on vocality as an ideal to which instrumentalists aspire, attention has not yet been paid to how “voice” is produced and manipulated discursively by instrumental musicians in the social contexts of their professional lives. Therefore, this thesis explores some of the ways in which instrumental musicians construct vocality in contemporary discourse about the practice of performance. In this thesis, a series of excerpts from pedagogical texts on instrumental music performance written in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries is presented to illuminate a discussion about vocality that has long been ongoing. Subsequently, a discourse approach is taken to the analysis of transcribed excerpts from four audio-visual recordings of instrumental masterclasses, alongside additional excerpts drawn from interviews with instrumental musicians and a variety of other contemporary texts. During the analytical process, two interpretative repertoires—recurring ways in which instrumental musicians construct vocality—are identified: the knowing voice and the disciplined voice. The discursive actions facilitated by musicians’ employment of these repertoires are examined in relation to the discourse excerpts. In response to this analysis, three claims are made. The first is that vocality is polysemic: it is constructed according to the social context and action-orientation of the discourse in which it is embedded. The second is that vocality is linked to the reproduction and naturalisation of normative musical practices. The third is that in musicians’ talk and texts, the construction of musical ideas is entangled with the construction of identities, and stories of voice provide especially rich material for authoring selves in the context of the masterclass. This thesis calls for expert performers to acknowledge, question, and engage critically with the ways in which they produce and perpetuate musical principles in their day-to-day practices, and for them to make space for developing musicians to do the same.

This thesis explores the notion of ‘in-betweenness’ through transcultural thinking in my compositional practice as a commentary to my portfolio of compositions. My thinking has been inspired by Tim Ingold’s philosophical idea of ‘wayfaring’ as a way to navigate processes by which insights emerge from collaborative investigations. My portfolio makes an original contribution to music by engaging with Malaysian Chinese and Indigenous cultural materials in fresh ways with a focus on music and dance collaborations with Indigenous Malaysian references, aural/oral traditions in Hakka poetry, and traditions of pattern making related to Borneo bead work. These projects have enabled me to deepen my experience and understanding of notions of entanglement and of how highly diverse elements can be unified through collaboration, presenting a series of case studies that also vary in style and the modality of discussion used. The discussion focuses around four main aspects related to intercultural exchange and collaboration: the value of negotiation, the meaning of ambiguity, strategies for navigating cultural meanings, and processes of cultural and musical transmission. Through these, I gain insights into the perception and practice of cultural exchange to find a new creative threshold for opening up new cultural dialogues in my compositional work.

The topic of this dissertation is the complex and varied relationship between words and music. Through the transference of the sonic and semantic properties and narrative capabilities of language to my music, I have discovered numerous ways of relating the meaning of the music to its design. This has resulted in a portfolio of pieces that incorporates text into vocal music, music with narration, and instrumental music. Chapter 1 functions in two ways. The first main subchapter sets out a theoretical framework for my research field by showing how the similarities and differences between language and music can illuminate exploitable tensions. These ideas draw on the work of Charles Ives, Virginia Woolf, Klaas de Vries, and Morton Feldman. The second subchapter explains the relevance of different textual elements and their eventual outcomes in my music. Chapter 2 provides commentary on eight pieces: Running at Still Life, Falling Up, as though birds, Sleep & Unremembrance, The Mysteries of Jacob, Three Pieces for Guitar (To the Sea in a Sieve), Beautiful School, and Three Biographies. A description and analysis of each piece relates the musical material and compositional process to the overall topic of words and music. Finally, Chapter 3 draws conclusions based on the eight pieces and discusses possible methods of reclassifying the text/music relationship in light of these musical outcomes.

Opening Opera explores creative collaboration and dramatic improvisation in new music-dramas. Looking towards the art of improvised theatre, the aim is to achieve a dramatic process in opera which facilitates a flexible kind of dramaturgy, enabling singers and directors to lead and inform certain creative processes that are normally in the hands of the operatic composer and/or librettist alone. By developing particular unorthodox scoring methods, along with specific rehearsal schedule considerations that support these flexible processes, the composer attempts to create not improvised opera, but what could be called an open opera, where the compositional focus is working with a free vocal line with active accompaniment. This framework is one in which the composer provides the parameters and material for dramatic and compositional flexibility, and then 'takes a step back' during a collaborative and improvisational process, whilst retaining sufficient leadership and creative authority to realise the overarching structure satisfactorily. In order to develop said unorthodox scoring methods and processes, the creative team explored and informed structural, dramatic, technical and musical aspects of new material, utilising the performers' specialised training and experience in an interactive creative process. This exploration brought up questions such as: how to allow an open process such as this one while still attempting to retain overarching artistic control; what are the parameters that the composer will need to determine (i.e. keep 'closed'); and what are the parameters that he must allow to be spontaneous, improvised or open? By opening up the process in this way, interesting genre specific problems were exposed that are more often than not left implicit rather than explicit by creators of opera. This exploration reveals knowledge beneficial to tutors, composers, librettists, singers, conductors and directors of music-dramas. This inquiry is primarily grounded in several methods extracted and modified from improvised theatre, opera, and open-scored compositions of the mid-20th century. The musical and qualitative data discussed in this commentary emerged during the preparation, writing and production of the author's original music-drama studies. Studies include excerpts from two chamber operas; A Glacier's Requiem (2013) (or "Bráð" in the original Icelandic), and Évariste (2014); a short monodrama study, Solitude 1 (2015); and a chamber opera presented in its entirety, After the Fall (2017).