Aaron Cassidy // composer & conductor

Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, 2007
Photo: Sharka Bosakova

upcoming performances

asphyxia dal niente (Ryan Muncy, soprano saxophone). The Spot, Chicago, Illinois. April 18, 2009.

Being itself a catastrophe, the diagram must not create a catastrophe (or, Third Study for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) and The Crutch of Memory ELISION (Richard Haynes, clarinet / Peter Veale, oboe; Graeme Jennings, violin). Kings Place, London, April 28, 2009.

The Crutch of Memory ELISION (Joan Wright, contrabass). Melbourne, Australia, July 2009.

I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips ELISION (Carl Rosman, voice), Kings Place, London, UK, November 2, 2009.

current projects
And the scream, Bacon's scream, is the operation through which the entire body escapes through the mouth (or, Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion) for ELISION
Second String Quartet for the JACK Quartet (Donaueschinger Musiktage 2010)

news
Selected to participate in the Herrenhaus Edenkoben conducting course, studying with Peter Eötvös and Zsolt Nagy, June/July 2009.
ELISION Portrait Concert broadcast by ABC Classic FM, February 28, 2009. Streaming rebroadcast available here.

Aaron Cassidy is an American composer and conductor based in the UK. His music is gaining increasingly widespread exposure, with performances in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, Croatia, England, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Poland, New Zealand, and Australia.

His music can be characterized by an uncompromising dedication to instability and fragmentation. The received wisdom of performance practice is continually questioned and reasserted, often with intentionally unpredictable results. His recent works have experimented largely with the interaction of a performer with his/her instrument, introducing a decoupling of component performance techniques through a variety of extended tablature notations. Fracture is prioritized in timbral, structural, and rhythmic strata in such a way that resulting aural units are themselves only the byproducts or collisions of independent (and often cyclic) musical processes. The musical score becomes, then, both the locus of processual sediment and concurrently the cause of significant deterritorialization on the part of performer and listener alike.

Recent projects have included significant research of linguistic, semantic, and spatial theories, focusing in particular on heightened states of dislocation (as in Jakobson's analysis of aphasics or Deleuze & Guattari's writings on smooth and haptic space).