Greg Fox
Born 1974 in Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom.
This website serves as a central information hub about Greg Fox's music, and provides structured links to particular pieces which can be
downloaded from The Internet Archive.
Mission Statement
It seems everyone is business-oriented in style nowadays so I'll try to fit in with that. My mission is to bring a rational, empirical and objective approach to the composition of new music. I try to remove from the process as far as I can any personal subjective input with regard to taste and style, preferring instead to find ways of building music from first principles.
In practical terms my mission is to make available, via this website and other relevant channels, everything that I produce for free. I am not concerned with acclaim or approval and my hope is that interested parties find the music honest and effective.
Brief Biography
I was born in the town of March in Cambridgeshire and grew up there. I studied at Huddersfield University with Christopher Fox (no family relation) and graduated in 1998 with a Masters in Composition.
As a teenager I was vehemently opposed to music as entertainment and I remain appalled by some of the ways in which an aural art is hijacked by other considerations to the extent that the music becomes almost irrelevant.
I mellowed as I grew older and discovered that some of the artists working in the 'popular music' domain had more integrity, musical intelligence and creative originality than many in the 'classical music' domain. I never have, however, found a way to tolerate jazz, rock or pop in their orthodox incarnations. I have particular common feeling with the philosophical and poetic position of Kristin Hersh and admire the ambiguous semi-popular-music/semi-academic career position of David Grubbs.
It's fair to say I was converted to twelve-tone serialism during my university years and I remain committed to the belief that form inevitably creates content and can in no way negate it. Many of my paper scores from the 1990s are more-or-less rigorous method pieces and some were recorded in student and workshop performances.
I particularly admire the early works of Luigi Nono and the large-scale theatrical style works of the 1960s such as Berio's 'Laborintus II' and Stockhausen's 'Momente'.
As is often the case with people born after the war, the next conversion was to indeterminacy. I was fortunate enough to attend numerous performances of the late 'number pieces' of John Cage and the beauty of musical sounds in more-or-less free combination seemed to me ample evidence that musical perception arises inevitably where musical sounds (and in a sense all sounds) combine with each other or with silence. One might call such an attitude pan-musicalism, and I am prepared to commit myself to this belief.
In addition to strictly musical considerations, I strongly believe that music can be enriched by pollution from extra-musical elements. Whilst the spectacle of commercial popular music is an extreme and unfavourable example of this tendency, music theatre is a common example of how it can work. I particularly admire the constant theatricality of the instrumental writing of Georges Aperghis and the highly visual virtuosity of Gerald Barry's stage works, particularly his music for Siobhan Davies' ballet 'White Bird Featherless'.
I worked in the civil service for a number of years and then in the social care sector where many of my left-wing beliefs were completely disproven. I have suffered from problems relating to my mental health since childhood, mainly concerning chronic anxiety, withdrawal from society, and being perceived by other people as somewhat odd. I became seriously ill in 2004 and ceased work in 2005. I remain unable to function socially at the present time (2008) but in the solitude of this room I hope that this document and indeed my music in general does not strike the reader as simply a product of mental ill health. It would be foolish however to suppose that the factors involved in the problems I perceive and which others perceive in me have no bearing on the nature of the work.
Nature of Compositional Works
My music falls into three fairly distinct categories.
Indeterminacy
Some of the pieces are based on indeterminate material generated by stochastic processes. Usually I define particular range settings and assign weightings to particular outcomes so that the material is determined by me at a high level but at the low level of actual notes the outcome is not known in advance.
My ongoing software project Ramugen serves to assist in this process, and allows a wide variety of control and relinquishment of control with regard to the settings themselves.
Key works of this kind include:
Malhaus
Pompa Funebris
and
Boxing Day Retreat
Periodic Pointillism
Some of my other pieces are based on a technique I call Periodic Pointillism, in which music is conceived as a network of isolated, mechanistic points which follow simple mindless processes, often simply repeating a fixed duration followed by a fixed silence, where the various elements are not related to one another within a fixed metrical system but are rather presented simultaneously with independent systems of time. The musical surface is an emergent property of the system and results from our innate musicality. The act of poetic composition is, in a sense, conducted by the listener rather than the composer.
My interest in simple mechanical periodic elements began with my project 'Carmen of the Spheres(2006),' which attempted to aurally model the motion of the (planetary) solar system. The result included so much emergent musical material that I decided to try other periodic systems to write music.
It amuses me to think that for every piece of Periodic Pointillist music there may well exist an orbital system somewhere in the universe that is perfectly isomorphic to it by octave transposition.
Key works of this kind include:
Long Night Music
Dirge
and
The Tonal System
Microtonality
Another element in my music of interest is microtonality. I grew up with Leonard Bernstein's wonderful Norton Lectures at Harvard from 1973 (just before I was born) and I was interested to test his empirical claim that whilst truly non-tonal music may be impossible within the twelve-note equal temperament system, it might be possible via what he called 'artificial means' by dividing the octave into prime numbers of divisions, such as thirteen.
I tested this hypothesis in various works, but most of all in 'Love Vaginas' (2006) and found that divisions of the octave made no noticeable difference. The brain still perceives broadly the same musical phenomena regardless of the specific deviations of the pitches. The fundamentally simple relationships of the octave and the fifth strongly determine our responses, regardless of fine-tuned deviations.
I tried not only dividing the octave into prime segments, but also undermining the octave itself and dividing a five-octave pitch-space into a prime number of divisions, such that no simple intervals at all exist in the tuning system. (For example 127, 53 and 43 divisions of a five-octave space.)
The results were the same: musical responses originate in the listener and consist of the same set of basic intervals found universally based on the circle of fifths.
Key works of this kind include:
Opening Pandora
43 Divs
and
Stain Class and Penuflection
Further Information
A comprehensive catalogue of pieces arranged by date of composition and with clickable CD covers linking to specific information about each piece can be found here.
For more information on the method used to model orbital systems in 'Carmen of the Spheres', click here.
To contact me please remove the word 'tommyrot' from the following email address: gregskiustommyrot@tescotommyrot.net
Political/Philosophical Information
I am an atheist and harbour no supernatural beliefs of any kind.
I believe that the power of design through random change and natural selection is immense and always serves as a useful guide to understand complex phenomena.
I am generally in accord with the philosophical positions adopted by Daniel C Dennett, in particular the absence of a central locus of consciousness, the compatibility of free will with determinism, and the value of heterophenomenological data in ascertaining which questions need to be investigated objectively.
I am in favour of a strong state with effective controls of law and order, and of the protection of personal liberty where it does not impact upon other people.
I am a pessimist and believe that Thomas Malthus(ref) and Garrett Hardin (ref) are right about population growth, and that James Lovelock is right about climate change and human environmental impact.
I do not believe in the orthodox concept of race and I concur with Jared Diamond's position (ref) that there are numerous possible groupings of human sub-groups and that the visually salient features were probably exaggerated through sexual selection.
I believe that the road traffic system is inherently dangerous (ref) and that this is, objectively speaking, unacceptable.
This page last updated 2nd of December 2008.