In 1979 Emsley co-founded with composer James Clarke the ensemble Suoraan, one of the first British groups to promote the music of Xenakis, Finnissy, Ferneyhough, Dillon and Dench. He composed six works for the ensemble including the extended music theatre piece The Juniper Tree<\/em>. Following his time with Suoraan Emsley fulfilled commissions for The Fires of London, the harpsichordist Jane Chapman and the now-defunct Inner London Education Authority. In 1988 the publication of an article on Emsley\u2019s work in Tempo<\/em> by the composer Richard Barrett led to an invition to participate in the Composers\u2019 Forum at Darmstadt Ferienkurse f\u00fcr Neue Musik.<\/p>\n In 1996, after a period of creative silence and experimentation, Emsley began to explore a seam of gaunt solo piano writing in the works finnissys fifty<\/em> and the extended for piano<\/em> series.<\/em> Subsequently performed by numerous pianists and twice selected for ISCM World Music Days in 1999 at Bucharest and 2001 at Yokohama, three pianists in particular have been associated with these works: their initial proponent Ian Pace, who performed for piano 2<\/em> in Bratislava, Cologne, Heilbronn, London and Dublin during 1999; Philip Thomas, who commissioned the 42-minute for piano 13<\/em> for an Emsley portrait concert which he curated in Sheffield in 2003; and Jonathan Powell, who commissioned the latest in the series, for piano 15<\/em>, an extended meditation of 40 minutes recently discussed at length by Arnold Whittall in \u201cExpressionism revisited: modernism beyond the twentieth century\u201d published in Transformations of Musical Modernism<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2002 Emsley began Still\/s<\/em>, a cycle of 24 solos, duos and trios written for all the combinations of a five-instrument reservoir. Exploring even more drastically pared-down material than the piano works, this series sprang from a collaboration with the visual artist Joan Key and the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, commissioned by the iconic De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Further pieces from the cycle have been commissioned by Carl Rosman and Mark Knoop of the Libra Ensemble, violinists Angharad Davies and\u00a0Darragh Morgan, clarinettists Ian Mitchell and Andrew Sparling\u00a0and the London concert series Music We\u2019d Like To Hear, under whose auspices the ensemble Apartment House performed Still\/s 1-6<\/em> as a concert-length event curated by Tim Parkinson in 2008. The complete Still\/s\u00a0<\/em>cycle was performed by Apartment House in April 2022 for Music We’d Like To Hear of which there is now a professionally shot film released on Youtube<\/a>. Read here a 2022 interview with Richard Emsley about Still\/s<\/em> cycle<\/a>.<\/p>\n A portrait CD of Emsley\u2019s music performed by pianist Ian Pace, guitarist Alan Thomas and the ensemble Topologies, conducted by Mikel Toms, was released on the Divine Art\/Metier label in 2002, and three of Emsley\u2019s piano works are included on British!<\/em>, a recent CD release by the German pianist Steffen Schleiermacher. In 2011 a joint 60th<\/sup> birthday concert with the British composer James Erber was given in London.<\/p>\n Recent projects include the inception of a series entitled\u00a0Cast\u00a0<\/em>for live instruments combined with a tape part treating the voice of mezzo soprano Lor\u00e9 Lixenberg; the completion of three orchestral works, Strange Attractor<\/em>, \u2026des tactiques de lenteur\u2026<\/em> and The Uncertain Life of the Brain,<\/em> the former being commissioned by the BBC and first performed as part of Glasgow Tectonics by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov; the completion of a 2-hour electro-acoustic piece\u00a0Music for Pretend Orchestra<\/em><\/a>; the completion of the 3-hour chamber cycle\u00a0Still\/s<\/em>; and in 2020\/21 the completion of for piano<\/em> nos.16-22. and a Piano Quartet.<\/p>\n