Christopher Fox (born 10 March 1955) is an English composer and writer on music.

Biography

He studied at the universities of

Liverpool Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a popul ...

Southampton Southampton () is a port city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire in southern England. It is located approximately south-west of London and west of Portsmouth. The city forms part of the South Hampshire built-up area, which also covers Po ...

and York, where his teachers included

Hugh Wood Hugh Wood (27 June 1932 – 14 August 2021) was a British composer. Biography Wood was born in Parbold, Lancashire and grew up in a musical family; while still a teenager, he was encouraged by the composer Alan Bush. He says that his "earlies ...

and Jonathan Harvey. He received a PhD in composition from the

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

in 1984. From 1984 to 1994 he was a member of the composition staff at the

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the States of Germany, state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Area, Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it th ...

New Music Summer School. He is currently Professor in Music at

Brunel University Brunel University London is a public research university located in the Uxbridge area of London, England. It was founded in 1966 and named after the Victorian engineer and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In June ...

, a post he took up in 2006. His music is widely performed, broadcast and recorded. He is also a prolific writer on music. In addition to concert works, Fox has collaborated with artists on gallery works, and with the poet Ian Duhig on a "musical box". An important aspect of Fox's music is its stylistic breadth—whilst his principal considerations may seem to be with systems music and adopting a systematic approach, his music also serves a political function, is deeply rooted in the post-war

traditions of applying psychological and intellectual models to the structure and content of music and at the same time exists in a world of diverse musical attitudes, including references to the popular arts, to historical music and to cross-cultural music. The stylistic range of his works is very aurally apparent and includes complex

microtonal Microtonal music or microtonality is the use in music of microtones— intervals smaller than a semitone, also called "microintervals". It may also be extended to include any music using intervals not found in the customary Western tuning of t ...

chamber works, large-scale modernist ensemble pieces, tape cut-up collages and minimalistic pieces for

guitar The guitar is a fretted musical instrument that typically has six strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming or plucking the strings with the dominant hand, while simultaneously pressing selected stri ...

s and

saxophone The saxophone (often referred to colloquially as the sax) is a type of single-reed woodwind instrument with a conical body, usually made of brass. As with all single-reed instruments, sound is produced when a reed on a mouthpiece vibrates to pr ...

s. His writings on music have also been published widely, in the journals ''Contact'' (of which he was an editor), ''Contemporary Music Review'', ''Musical Times'' and ''Tempo'', and deal principally with new music, in particular experimental, minimalist and complex tendencies in American and European music. He was co-editor of ''Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart'' (1996, DACO Verlag, Stuttgart), a history of 50 years of the Darmstadt Ferienkurse, and of ''Uncommon Ground: The Music of Michael Finnissy'' (1998, Ashgate Press, Aldershot).

Recordings

* ''Inner'': Straight Lines in Broken Times? / chant suspendu / Generic Compositions #3, #4, & #5 / Inner; performed by Anton Lukosevieze (cello); Metier Records (2001)

References

External links

The Fox Edition

Fox Additions
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fox, Christopher 1955 births 20th-century classical composers 21st-century classical composers English classical composers Alumni of the University of York Academics of Brunel University London Living people English male classical composers 20th-century English composers 21st-century English composers 20th-century British male musicians 21st-century British male musicians Writers about music

Biography

Recordings

References

Further reading

External links