Christopher Hobbs
Encyclopedia
Christopher Hobbs is an English
experimental
composer
, best known as a pioneer of British Systems music
.
, near London. He was a junior exhibitioner at Trinity College, London, then was Cornelius Cardew
's first student at the Royal Academy of Music
from 1967. Hobbs worked with Cardew and Christian Wolff
: he joined AMM
, appearing on two albums: The Crypt and Laminal.
In 1969, Hobbs was a member from the first meeting of the Scratch Orchestra
, and, as its youngest member, designed the Scratch Orchestra's first concert, at Hampstead
Town Hall on 1 November 1969. His early composition Voicepiece, part of his Verbal Pieces group, was used often enough to be called a Popular Classic in the Scratch Orchestra nomenclature.
As experimental music was hard to come by, Hobbs gathered sheet music from friends and founded the Experimental Music Catalogue
in 1968 as a distribution centre. Various pieces were eventually grouped into a series of Anthologies according to themes: the Verbal Anthology (of text-notation music), Keyoard, and Educational Anthologies are typical. These anthologies published works mainly by British experimentalists, but also works by Christian Wolff
, Frederic Rzewski
, Terry Jennings and other American experimentalists. After a few years, Hobbs was joined by Gavin Bryars
and Michael Nyman
in the operation of the Catalogue, which lasted in its original form, until the early 1980s.
Hobbs was a founder-member of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra
, with John White
, Alec Hill
, and Hugh Shrapnel
, a group of composer-performers that specialised in music for toy pianos and reed organs. On the breakup of the PTO (for political reasons, as Shrapnel and Hill wanted a greater political content in the works played and Hobbs and White did not), Hobbs and White formed the eponymous Hobbs-White Duo, which lasted until 1976. He also took part in several momentous one-off concerts, most notably in a complete performance of Erik Satie
's Vexations with Bryars in Leicester.
Hobbs' musical output includes his Duchamp-influenced musical readymades, in which found materials are manipulated in some manner, such as The Remorseless Lamb (1970), in which sections of a two-piano arrangement of Bach's 'Sheep May Safely Graze' are rearranged by random means. His best-known work of this time is probably Aran in which the note-to-note system is taken from the knitting pattern for an Aran sweater. Hobbs and White moved to a freely-composed eclectic style (since White had been writing piano sonata
s of great charm and brevity, Hobbs began writing piano sonatina
s of great length and weight). In the 1980s, Hobbs wrote for the then-new Casio
electronic keyboard
s, including the toy VL-Tone (in Back Seat Album of 1983) and the MT-750 (17 On-Minute Pieces for Bass Clarinet
and Casio MT750). He also wrote for the Hartzell Hilton Band, of which he was founder member, and for other ensembles, including the Dublin Sinfonia.
Since the 1990s, Hobbs returned to systems composition, some with an emphasis on textual content, as in Extended Relationships and False Endings (1993; systemic manipulation of American soap-opera synopses) and No One Will Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (1996; manipulation and setting of letters to the Mt. Wilson Observatory). His Fifty in Two-Thousand (2000), a birthday celebration, uses partially prepared piano, electronic keyboard, and percussion in strict permutations, while maintaining a friendly, melodic soundworld. This combination of strict rigour and audience-friendly surface is typical of most of Hobbs' work since 1970, as is his use of cheap (toy or amateur) electronics. Hobbs has recently begun using Apple Computer
's basic GarageBand
software to write a series of pieces based on sudoku
puzzles (which provide permutations of numbers and letters in a grid). This has led to a double album released in November 2006, called Sudoku Music (Experimental Music Catalogue, EMC 104, 2006). In 2009, a CD single of the twenty-minute "Sudoku 82", realised first on GarageBand
and transcribed for eight pianos (performed and multi-tracked by Bryan Pezzone), was released on Cold Blue Recordings (CB0033).
Hobbs was Director of Music at Drama Centre
, London from 1973-1991. He has taught at Leicester Polytechnic
(later De Montfort University
) since 1985. He is also Associate Senior Lecturer in Music at Coventry University
.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
experimental
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
, best known as a pioneer of British Systems music
Systems music
Systems music is a term which has been used to describe the work of composers who concern themselves primarily with sound continuums which evolve gradually, often over very long periods of time . Historically, the American minimalists Steve Reich, La Monte Young and Philip Glass are considered the...
.
Life and career
Hobbs was born in HillingdonHillingdon
Hillingdon is a suburban area within the London Borough of Hillingdon, situated 14.2 miles west of Charing Cross.Much of Hillingdon is represented as the Hillingdon East ward within the local authority, Hillingdon Council...
, near London. He was a junior exhibitioner at Trinity College, London, then was Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew
Cornelius Cardew was an English experimental music composer, and founder of the Scratch Orchestra, an experimental performing ensemble. He later rejected the avant-garde in favour of a politically motivated "people's liberation music".-Biography:Cardew was born in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire...
's first student at the Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy of Music
The Royal Academy of Music in London, England, is a conservatoire, Britain's oldest degree-granting music school and a constituent college of the University of London since 1999. The Academy was founded by Lord Burghersh in 1822 with the help and ideas of the French harpist and composer Nicolas...
from 1967. Hobbs worked with Cardew and Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (composer)
Christian G. Wolff is an American composer of experimental classical music.-Biography:Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S...
: he joined AMM
AMM (group)
AMM are an important British free improvisation group, founded in London, England in 1965.AMM have never been well known to the general public, but have been incredibly influential on the field of improvised music...
, appearing on two albums: The Crypt and Laminal.
In 1969, Hobbs was a member from the first meeting of the Scratch Orchestra
Scratch Orchestra
The Scratch Orchestra was an experimental musical ensemble founded in the spring of 1969 by Cornelius Cardew, Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton....
, and, as its youngest member, designed the Scratch Orchestra's first concert, at Hampstead
Hampstead
Hampstead is an area of London, England, north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland...
Town Hall on 1 November 1969. His early composition Voicepiece, part of his Verbal Pieces group, was used often enough to be called a Popular Classic in the Scratch Orchestra nomenclature.
As experimental music was hard to come by, Hobbs gathered sheet music from friends and founded the Experimental Music Catalogue
Experimental Music Catalogue
The Experimental Music Catalogue was founded in 1968 by Christopher Hobbs in order to provide an outlet for new music by composers of the English experimental movement, Publications appeared mainly as generic anthologies, such as the Verbal Anthology,String Anthology, Rhythmic Anthology and the...
in 1968 as a distribution centre. Various pieces were eventually grouped into a series of Anthologies according to themes: the Verbal Anthology (of text-notation music), Keyoard, and Educational Anthologies are typical. These anthologies published works mainly by British experimentalists, but also works by Christian Wolff
Christian Wolff (composer)
Christian G. Wolff is an American composer of experimental classical music.-Biography:Wolff was born in Nice in France to German literary publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff, who had published works by Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Walter Benjamin. After relocating to the U.S...
, Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Rzewski
Frederic Anthony Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist.- Biography :Rzewski began playing piano at age 5. He attended Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton, where his teachers included Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston and Milton Babbitt...
, Terry Jennings and other American experimentalists. After a few years, Hobbs was joined by Gavin Bryars
Gavin Bryars
Richard Gavin Bryars is an English composer and double bassist. He has been active in, or has produced works in, a variety of styles of music, including jazz, free improvisation, minimalism, historicism, experimental music, avant-garde and neoclassicism.-Early life and career:Born in Goole, East...
and Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman
Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer of minimalist music, pianist, librettist and musicologist, known for the many film scores he wrote during his lengthy collaboration with the filmmaker Peter Greenaway, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano...
in the operation of the Catalogue, which lasted in its original form, until the early 1980s.
Hobbs was a founder-member of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra
Promenade Theatre Orchestra
Promenade Theatre Orchestra was an English quartet founded by John White in 1969 and consisted of the composer/performers White, Christopher Hobbs, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel...
, with John White
John White (composer)
John White is an English composer and musical performer.-Life:White trained and taught at the London Royal College of Music...
, Alec Hill
Alec Hill
Alec Jeffrey Hill AM, MBE, ED was an Australian military historian and academic best known for his biography of General Harry Chauvel and his work on the Australian Dictionary of Biography.-Biography:...
, and Hugh Shrapnel
Hugh Shrapnel
Hugh Shrapnel is an English composer of contemporary classical music and oboist. He was a student of Cornelius Cardew and a member of the Scratch Orchestra. He also co-founded the Promenade Theatre Orchestra in 1969....
, a group of composer-performers that specialised in music for toy pianos and reed organs. On the breakup of the PTO (for political reasons, as Shrapnel and Hill wanted a greater political content in the works played and Hobbs and White did not), Hobbs and White formed the eponymous Hobbs-White Duo, which lasted until 1976. He also took part in several momentous one-off concerts, most notably in a complete performance of Erik Satie
Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was a colourful figure in the early 20th century Parisian avant-garde...
's Vexations with Bryars in Leicester.
Hobbs' musical output includes his Duchamp-influenced musical readymades, in which found materials are manipulated in some manner, such as The Remorseless Lamb (1970), in which sections of a two-piano arrangement of Bach's 'Sheep May Safely Graze' are rearranged by random means. His best-known work of this time is probably Aran in which the note-to-note system is taken from the knitting pattern for an Aran sweater. Hobbs and White moved to a freely-composed eclectic style (since White had been writing piano sonata
Sonata
Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...
s of great charm and brevity, Hobbs began writing piano sonatina
Sonatina
A sonatina is literally a small sonata. As a musical term, sonatina has no single strict definition; it is rather a title applied by the composer to a piece that is in basic sonata form, but is shorter, lighter in character, or more elementary technically than a typical sonata...
s of great length and weight). In the 1980s, Hobbs wrote for the then-new Casio
Casio
is a multinational electronic devices manufacturing company founded in 1946, with its headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Casio is best known for its electronic products, such as calculators, audio equipment, PDAs, cameras, musical instruments, and watches...
electronic keyboard
Electronic keyboard
An electronic keyboard is an electronic or digital keyboard instrument.The major components of a typical modern electronic keyboard are:...
s, including the toy VL-Tone (in Back Seat Album of 1983) and the MT-750 (17 On-Minute Pieces for Bass Clarinet
Bass clarinet
The bass clarinet is a musical instrument of the clarinet family. Like the more common soprano B clarinet, it is usually pitched in B , but it plays notes an octave below the soprano B clarinet...
and Casio MT750). He also wrote for the Hartzell Hilton Band, of which he was founder member, and for other ensembles, including the Dublin Sinfonia.
Since the 1990s, Hobbs returned to systems composition, some with an emphasis on textual content, as in Extended Relationships and False Endings (1993; systemic manipulation of American soap-opera synopses) and No One Will Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again (1996; manipulation and setting of letters to the Mt. Wilson Observatory). His Fifty in Two-Thousand (2000), a birthday celebration, uses partially prepared piano, electronic keyboard, and percussion in strict permutations, while maintaining a friendly, melodic soundworld. This combination of strict rigour and audience-friendly surface is typical of most of Hobbs' work since 1970, as is his use of cheap (toy or amateur) electronics. Hobbs has recently begun using Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's basic GarageBand
GarageBand
GarageBand is a software application for Mac OS X and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. It is developed by Apple Inc. as a part of the iLife software package on Mac OS X.-Audio recording:...
software to write a series of pieces based on sudoku
Sudoku
is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9...
puzzles (which provide permutations of numbers and letters in a grid). This has led to a double album released in November 2006, called Sudoku Music (Experimental Music Catalogue, EMC 104, 2006). In 2009, a CD single of the twenty-minute "Sudoku 82", realised first on GarageBand
GarageBand
GarageBand is a software application for Mac OS X and iOS that allows users to create music or podcasts. It is developed by Apple Inc. as a part of the iLife software package on Mac OS X.-Audio recording:...
and transcribed for eight pianos (performed and multi-tracked by Bryan Pezzone), was released on Cold Blue Recordings (CB0033).
Hobbs was Director of Music at Drama Centre
Drama Centre
Drama Centre London is a British drama school in King's Cross, London, where it recently relocated after a major reshaping of the university. The school is part of the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design of the University of the Arts London and is a member of the Conference of Drama...
, London from 1973-1991. He has taught at Leicester Polytechnic
De Montfort University
De Montfort University is a public research and teaching university situated in the medieval Old Town of Leicester, England, adjacent to the River Soar and the Leicester Castle Gardens...
(later De Montfort University
De Montfort University
De Montfort University is a public research and teaching university situated in the medieval Old Town of Leicester, England, adjacent to the River Soar and the Leicester Castle Gardens...
) since 1985. He is also Associate Senior Lecturer in Music at Coventry University
Coventry University
Coventry University is a post-1992 university in Coventry, West Midlands, England. Under the terms of the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992, the institution's name was changed from Coventry Polytechnic to Coventry University...
.
Sources
- Anderson, Virginia. 1991. 'Hobbs, Christopher'. In Contemporary Composers. London: St. James Press.
- Anderson, Virginia. 1983. "British Experimental Music: Cornelius Cardew and his Contemporaries". M.A. thesis, Redlands, California: University of Redlands (Facsimile edition published 2000, Leicester: Experimental Music CatalogueExperimental Music CatalogueThe Experimental Music Catalogue was founded in 1968 by Christopher Hobbs in order to provide an outlet for new music by composers of the English experimental movement, Publications appeared mainly as generic anthologies, such as the Verbal Anthology,String Anthology, Rhythmic Anthology and the...
; new edition forthcoming, as Experimental Music in Britain.) - Anderson, Virginia. 2009. 'Hobbs, Christopher'. In Grove Music Online (revised 9 September). Accessed December 22, 2010 .
- Bryars, Gavin. 1982. 'Satie and the British'. Contact, no. 25, p. 11.
- Bryars, Gavin. 1983. Vexations and its Performers'. Contact, no. 26, pp. 12-20.
- Childs, Barney, and Christopher Hobbs, eds. 1982–83. 'Forum: Improvisation'. Perspectives of New Music 21, nos. 1 & 2 (Fall-Winter and Spring-Summer): 26–111.
- 'Hobbs, Christopher', in John Vinton, ed. 1974. Dictionary of Contemporary Composers. New York: Dutton.
- Nyman, Michael. 1999. Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, second edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (First edition, London: Studio Vista, Cassell and Collier Macmillan Publishers Limitd, 1974. ISBN 0-289-70182-1)
- West, Peter, and Peter Evans. 1971. 'Interview with Christopher Hobbs' Contact, no. 3, pp. 17-23.