Chris Swithinbank

NB: This post refers to a pre­vi­ous site re-de­sign.

Wel­come to a new look web­site. Please glance around and get in touch or leave a com­ment if you see any­thing that looks bro­ken. I am still tin­ker­ing with things, so things might change, and there should be sec­tions with audio and video up at some point in the fu­ture. Any other feed­back is also wel­come.

If you are so in­clined, take a look at the colophon for de­tails of what makes this site tick.

If you can’t find some­thing that used to be here, have a root around in the archived ver­sion of the old site. I think that’s all work­ing as it used to. If you have an old link you want to keep using, just put v1 where you might ex­pect www to be and you should end up in the right place.

“If we re­main grotesquely un­equal, we shall lose all sense of fra­ter­nity: and fra­ter­nity, for all its fa­tu­ity as a po­lit­i­cal ob­jec­tive, turns out to be the nec­es­sary con­di­tion of pol­i­tics it­self.”

I’ve just got round to fin­ish­ing Tony Judt’s ex­cel­lent essay on the im­por­tance of the state printed in the Guardian Re­view the week­end be­fore last. Read the whole thing. Judt suf­fers from a motor neu­rone dis­or­der, which was the sub­ject of an in­ter­view and an essay also pub­lished in the Guardian ear­lier this year.

I am cur­rently work­ing on a new work for clar­inet, cello, piano and hand­held per­cus­sion to be pre­miered on Fri­day 30th April at 17:30 by play­ers from Psap­pha new music en­sem­ble.

Mikrokonz­ert: I Swear I Saw the Sun Falling, writ­ten last year, will be per­formed by new music en­sem­ble Va­ganza on 16th May at the York Spring Fes­ti­val of New Music and on 8th June at the RNCM.

Over the last few months, along with friends Rob Guy and Steve Py­croft, I’ve been in­volved in set­ting up new music en­sem­ble and com­posers’ col­lec­tive Raise Your Voice. I’m re­ally pleased to be able to an­nounce our launch night will be on 28 Feb­ru­ary 2010 in Cen­tro Bar, doors open­ing around 19:30. The night will fea­ture new music by Man­ches­ter-based com­posers per­formed by the Raise Your Voice En­sem­ble of su­perb young play­ers, plus a lap­top set, im­pro­vi­sa­tion with live elec­tron­ics and DJs. See the Raise Your Voice web­site for de­tails of the night, full pro­gramme and in­for­ma­tion about every­body in­volved.

A new piece of mine, This is Water!, will be per­formed by the full en­sem­ble of flute, clar­inet, per­cus­sion, string quar­tet and elec­tron­ics as part of this Sun­day evening con­cert.

List­ings: Face­book / Last.​fm / My­Space / Of­fi­cial page
Flyer (PDF, 150kb)