Tim Hodgkinson

Born in 1949, graduate in social anthropology at Cambridge, co-founder of the group «Henry Cow», Tim Hodgkinson is a self-taught composer involved in several fields of research who has often chosen to work outside institutional structures.
Taking improvisation as a vital contemporary aesthetic practice, he performs regularly as an improviser - primarily on clarinets and lap-steel guitar - and from 1979 onwards has been involved in numerous solo and collective improvisation projects all over the world. His compositions are regularly interpreted in international festivals.
In 1990 he began a series of study trips to Siberia with percussionist Ken Hyder, which led him to work closely with musicians and ritual specialists from non-European cultures.
He has published numerous articles on improvised music, musique concrète, and above all on the aesthetic problems connected with the introduction of new technologies into contemporary music-making.

Tim Hodgkinson Repulsion (1997)
for clarinet, electric guitar, trombone and percussion

On the audible level the material is passed several times through a kind of structural sieve that has the effect of driving apart its elements. Thus melody tends, for example, to heap up in one place, whilst pauses and suspensions elongate, and accents become autonomous and cataclysmic. In this way the inner tension of the material expresses itself in the explicitness of the mutual repulsion of its elements. This potentially infinite process of explosion seems to come up against some boundary of scale beyond which looms actual disintegration. I am not sure whether this is scale in the Feldman sense or something more anthropological to do with the objective characteristics of a performance in time and its ratio to human temporality.
(Tim Hodgkinson, 2003)

 

 

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