Aaron Cassidy // composer & conductor

Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, 2007
Photo: Sharka Bosakova

upcoming performances

asphyxia (Richard Haynes, soprano saxophone) ELISION ensemble, Government House, Sydney, Australia, July 13, 2008.

PORTRAIT CONCERT ELISION. ABC Ferry Road, Brisbane, Australia, July 27, 2008. To be broadcast by ABC Classic FM.
String Quartet JACK Quartet, Festival Internacional Chihuahua, Mexico, September 24 and 28, 2008.

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

news
“Determinate Action/Indeterminate Sound: Tablature and chance in several recent works.” Facets of the Second Modernity. New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century, Volume 6. Mahnkopf, Schurig and Cox, eds. Wolke Verlag, June 2008.

"the green is either" featured on Counterstream Radio, Thursday, February 28, 9pm EST and Sunday, March 2, 3pm EST

Appointed Senior Lecturer in Composition at the University of Huddersfield, October 2007

Aaron Cassidy is an American composer and conductor. His music is gaining increasingly widespread exposure, with performances in the United States, Mexico, 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).