Francis Bacon, a painter of figures in rooms

One of the great challenges of presenting and discussing my work over the last several years has been pulling the conversation back from technical, practical, logistical issues and regaining a focus on aesthetic, artistic, musical ones. I am aware, of course, that it is in many ways the notation – and the unusual performance techniques and approaches to instruments/voices that made the development of that notation necessary – that gives the works their identity, or at least, on the surface, gives them their uniqueness. But it’s also clear to me that this focus on the practical, factual aspects of the work is far too easy (it reminds me in many ways of the analyses of early 20th century repertoire that I had to do as an undergraduate in which we were identifying pitch sets or serial row transformations without ever actually engaging with sound in any real way, much less wider cultural or social contexts), and it risks turning the notation and the performance techniques into a kind of gimmick, a shtick, or, as I am increasingly discovering, a ‘brand’.