"...fragility, hesitancy, ambiguity, strangeness, unpredictability and a certain tenuousness of coherence - all this arises from a general swing in my working methods away from a grasping at guaranteed, 'nailed-down' outcomes and towards a radical openness to the unforeseen - away from intention and towards discovery..."
RICHARD EMSLEY

richard emsley

biography

Richard Emsley was born in Goole, Yorkshire in December 1951. His first musical interests, starting at about the age of 10, revolved around the pop music of the early to mid-1960's and this period saw the composition of about 100 pop songs. By his mid-teens Emsley had been introduced by a friend to the classical music of the early twentieth century in the shape of works such as Schoenberg's Five Orchestral Pieces Op.16 and Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps.

During his formal musical education at University College Cardiff Emsley tended to specialise in analytical rather than compositional options, his first year dissertation being on the subject of musical stasis and later ones exploring movement and time in twentieth century music and the work of Pierre Boulez. During this period Emsley frequently attended the composition classes of Peter Maxwell Davies at Dartington Summer School of Music, and composed his earliest acknowledged work The lunar silences, the silent tide lapping...

On moving to London in 1976 Emsley took on work as a music engraver, which continues to be his principal form of livelihood. A central activity at this time was the London new music ensemble Suoraan, co-founded and directed with the composer James Clarke. Consisting of a small band of outstanding specialist performers, the ensemble dedicatedly promoted the music of, centrally, Iannis Xenakis but also younger British and European composers such as Michael Finnissy and James Dillon. Six ensemble works were composed by Emsley for the group, including in 1981 the music theatre piece The Juniper Tree.

After leaving Suoraan Emsley fulfilled a number of commissions including a children's music theatre work for the Inner London Education Authority and ...from swerve of shore to bend of bay... for The Fires of London. In 1988 an article on Emsley's work by composer Richard Barrett appeared in Tempo magazine, leading to an invitation to participate in the Composers' Forum at Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik. However, following the composition of the piano solo work Flow Form there ensued a lengthy period of reappraisal and experimentation.

The creative silence of this period was finally broken with finnissys fifty, Little Sunderings and the first of the for piano series, these works representing the discovery of a new pared-down piano idiom which has proved a fruitful seam.

finnissys fifty was commissioned and first performed by the pianist Ian Pace, who has continued to be a major exponent of Emsley's work, performing it, as well as in Britain, at festivals including 'Evenings of New Music' Bratislava, 'Music Summit' Cologne, '...antasten... Internationales Pianoforum' Heilbronn and 'Mostly Modern' Dublin. Additionally, works in the for piano series have twice been selected for performance at ISCM World Music Days - in Bucharest (1999) and Yokohama (2001) - and have been taken up by other pianists including Isabel Ettenauer, Robert Keeley, Jonathan Powell, Kate Ryder, Scott Tinney and Mary Dullea.

The first twelve pieces of the for piano series received their first complete performance as a cycle in December 2003 when the young Japanese pianist Kentaro Noda played them at the inaugural concert of a new music venue in Kobe. for piano 13 is a substantial work of 42 minutes composed in response to a commission from the pianist Philip Thomas, while the latest in the series, for piano 14 and for piano 15, were commissioned and first performed by Jonathan Powell.

Currently, in contrast to this exclusive focus on the solo piano, Emsley has begun Still/s, a series of 24 solos, duos and trios exploring all the possible combinations of a five-instrument reservoir. Involving even more drastically pared-down material than the piano works, this series sprang from a collaboration with the visual artist Joan Key whose Six White Paintings for Composition were shown in the 2002 Colour White exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion Bexhill concurrently with the first performance by Anton Lukoszevieze of Emsley's solo cello piece Still/s 1. Eight further works in the series have appeared so far - commissioned by the Libra Ensemble, the violinist Darragh Morgan and the London concert series Music We'd Like To Hear.