I am Emeritus Professor of Music at Bath Spa University and former Subject Leader for Music and have worked at Bath Spa since the mid-90s. As a clarinettist I have performed throughout Europe, in Canada and the US as a soloist and chamber musician. I’ve played with many groups and soloists including the Arditti, Kreutzer and Smith String Quartets, the Fidelio Trio, Ensemble Modern and was a member of the London Sinfonietta in the 90s. Concerto appearances include Boulez’s Domaines with the Sinfonietta conducted by Diego Masson, and Henze’s Le Miracle de la Rose with the Koenig Ensemble conducted by Henze.

I’ve been a member of the Gavin Bryars Ensemble since 1986, was Music Director of Rambert Dance Company (1988-93) and Clarinet Professor at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (1982-94). My early solo CDs of works by Reich, Bryars, Feldman and others for multi-tracked clarinets (1998), and Hymnos, with music by Maxwell Davies and Birtwistle (1998), won critics awards in the Sunday Times and BBC Music Magazine. Subsequent recordings include chamber music by Erhard Grosskopf (2001), Giacinto Scelsi’s clarinet concerto Kya (2002), Morton Feldman’s Clarinet and String Quartet (2004), solo music by Tom Johnson (2006) and Hugh Wood’s chamber music (2009). Two albums were released in 2013: solo works by Boulez and Radulescu and a commissioned clarinet quintet by Mihailo Trandafilovski with the Kreutzer Quartet. A recording planned for 2020 with the pianist Paul Chilvers, including Berg’s Vier Stücke Op. 5 and a clarinet version of the Altenberg Lieder, had to been postponed because of the pandemic, but it’s something I still want to do possibly with Schoenberg’s Clarinet Sonata (a version of his Wind Quintet for clarinet and piano made by Felix Greissle). My most recent recording is of Mihailo’s solo piece Sandglass on Metier (2022).

Festival appearances in recent years have included the Warsaw Autumn, Vilnius, CDMC Madrid, Prague, Bergen, Odense, Tallin, Riga, and the Valencia Biennale; touring with the Gavin Bryars Ensemble in the UK and Europe; concerts with the Fidelio Trio and the Kreutzer Quartet in programmes including Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, in Modena, London, Waterford Festival Ireland and Cyprus at the International Contemporary Music Festival in Nicosia.

My book The Versatile Clarinet was published by Routledge in 2005; I’ve contributed a chapter to The Cambridge History of Musical Performance (2012), also a short piece in the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (2009) and entries in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Historical Performance in Music (2018). I contributed a chapter on Chris Fox’s clarinet music in Perspectives on the Music of Christopher Fox, Routledge (2016).

Recently published is a chapter on music for dance in The Music of Gavin Bryars (Kahn and Averill, 2023), a chapter on contemporary clarinet techniques (in Portuguese, Edições Humus, 2020), and an article on Horatiu Radulescu for the online Research Catalogue (2020). I’m working on a book project on contemporary clarinet music and playing, which is still on note form(!) and obviously doesn’t have a home yet.