My world and welcome to it

By now, most visitors will be aware that this website is a joint creation, dreamt up by me (CD) but supervised and administered by my colleague, Andrew Bernard. All of the quirky elements on these pages are down to me;…

Richard Haynes premieres ghosts of motion in Bern

I’m accustomed to long waits between finishing a work and hearing it, sometimes in the order of years. So when Richard Haynes announced the première performance of my ghosts of motion for his new clarinet d’amore on 23 October–less than…

luminous, ghosts of motion …and beyond

I have been notably absent from the blog over the last three or so weeks. This is a consequence of my being nosedown in a pair of pieces, both now provisionally finished. The first is luminous for solo vibraphone, written…

2020 APRA AMCOS Art Music Awards winner

Well, who would have guessed it? After years of being a finalist here and there, a work of mine has finally won an Art Music Award outright: passing bells: day, performed and nominated by the outstanding Brisbane pianist Alex Raineri,…

The Notation Game

A change in my notation occurred in about 1995. Previously I had adopted a semiotically information-rich notation that I thought conveyed a considerable amount of useful information to the perceiver. However, a couple of decades of explanations and performances seemed…

Carl Rosman plays ruins within

Someone recently described Carl Rosman, precisely, as ‘the Compleat Musician’. Clarinetist extraordinaire, conductor, educator, I’ve known Carl for 25 years now, and not only is he is one of my favourite people, but also at the top of the list…

String Quartet (1985/2019)

Those who have visited this site before will have noticed that a new page has appeared dedicated to the nearly-completed study score of my 1985/2019 String Quartet. The version of the score that we have posted is, at this stage,…

Isolation schedule

I am pleased to be able to announce that the Australia Council graciously funded my ‘isolation schedule’ program of new works—These projects will have been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding…

An industry-mandated musical monoculture

In my recent interview for Score Follower I referred to a remark in an article in the New Yorker that said “The winner-take-all economics of online media … means that if streaming doesn’t work for jazz and classical music, then…

I wax anecdotal

In the space of two days last week two extensive interviews appeared online: The Score Follower interview, over which SF director Emir Bejo and I corresponded in 2019 and Episode 24: The Labyrinthine Worlds of Chris Dench, a real time…