Aaron Cassidy // composer & conductor

Iwaki Auditorium, Melbourne, 2007
Photo: Sharka Bosakova

upcoming performances

I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips MusikFabrik soloists (Carl Rosman, voice), Kölner Philharmonie Alter Wartesaal, Köln, Germany. February 18, 2010.

memory / memorial Peter Veale, oboe, Ensemble SurPlus Hommage à James Avery, E-Werk, Freiburg, Germany. February 28, 2010.

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) ELISION, Kings Place, London, UK. March 15, 2010.

current projects
Second String Quartet for the JACK Quartet (Donaueschinger Musiktage 2010)

news
Awarded Research Grant on the 'Practice-Led and Applied' Scheme of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the development of a new string tablature notation, in conjunction with the commission from the JACK Quartet and Südwestrundfunk/Donaueschinger Musiktage 2010.
Recording sessions with ELISION at Radio Bremen September 3-5 and 21-23, 2009, March 16-17, 2010. details and photos
Herrenhaus Edenkoben conducting course, studying with Peter Eötvös and Zsolt Nagy, June/July 2009. Closing concert with International Ensemble Modern Academy recorded for broadcast on SWR-2.ELISION Portrait Concert broadcast by ABC Classic FM, February 28, 2009.

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