User:GregFox

Greg Fox

I am a UK composer operating under the Creative Commons license for free distribution of music. Much of my work is electro-acoustic and based around chance music, similar to the later works of John Cage. I try to be fairly prolific and generally upload around five or six CD-length albums per year to http://www.archive.org/ and I also maintain a small website on my ISP free space currently at http://homepages.tesco.net/gregskius/

I also distribute my music via eBay, selling non-composition CDs from my collection and then giving away a free composition CD with the purchase, targeting the specific tracklisting to suit my impression of the likely taste of the buyer based on what they've bought.

I studied with Christopher Fox (not a family relation) at the University of Huddersfield, UK, finishing my master's degree in pure composition in 1998, focusing mainly on some research I was doing into the application of serial techniques to experimental tonal music. I have since become more interested in aleatoric techniques and the corruption of chance: taking chance events as a starting-point, the finished product is moulded by standard "musical ear" amendments. The idea is to combine technical/structural and intuitive processes with the broad starting-point of chance-music.

I am particularly interested in the music being written after the dawning of the CD and the internet, and music being written after the separation of "popular music" and "concert music" began to lose some of its meaning.

Early influences were Gerald Barry, James Dillon and Kaija Saariaho and nowadays I'm taking onboard a lot of the ideas of Marc Monnet, Georges Aperghis and the later works of Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In addition to this the aesthetics of Codeine, The Fall and Throwing Muses are particularly important to my conception of what music should be like.

I am also particuarly interested in collaborative music-making, remixing and working with the spoken word.

From 2006 much of my interest has been in the scaling of naturalistic data (such as planetary orbits) to audible pitches in Hz, and in the application of knowledge from evolutionary theory and game theory to stochastic music.