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Staff Profiles

Name and Contact Details	Summary
Dr John Croft Role: Head of Subject Phone: 01895 266583 Email: john.croft@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 030	John Croft (b. 1971) studied philosophy and music at the Victoria University of Wellington, and composition and music cognition at the University of Sheffield. He has a PhD from the University of Manchester, where he studied with John Casken, and is a Laureate of the Jurgenson Foundation of Moscow. His music draws on the spectral properties of sounds as the basis for harmonic and temporal structures, and recent work focusses on the use of live electronics in ways that extend rather than obscure the bodily relationship between performer and instrument. His music has been played by many ensembles and soloists, including the BBC Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, the Arditti String Quartet, Ensemble Exposé, Studiya Novoi Muzyki, 175 East, Stroma, Philip Thomas, Matthew Barley, Richard Craig, Barbara Lüneburg, and Xenia Pestova. He has also published articles and chapters on the philosophy of music
Mr Carl Faia Role: Convenor Sonic Arts Phone: 01895 265501 Email: carl.faia@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 110	Carl Faia studied composition at the University of California at Santa Barbara with Peter Racine Fricker and Edward Applebaum, and the Royal Academy of Music in Denmark, on a Fulbright grant, with Karl Aage Rasmussen and Per Norgaard. Since 1995 he has been active as a live electronics designer and composer working at IRCAM in Paris, the CIRM in Nice then as a freelance artist. He has collaborated with numerous composers and artists to present new works with computer electronics in festivals throughout Europe. He works regularly with Art Zoyd Studios in France and teaches Sonic Arts at Brunel University in London.
Professor Christopher Fox Role: Phone: 01895 267256 Email: christopher.fox@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 133	Christopher Fox is a composer, teacher and writer on new music. Between 1984 and 1994 he was a member of the composition staff of the Darmstadt New Music Summer School. During 1987 he lived in West Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berlin Artists Programme. He joined the University of Huddersfield in 1994, eventually becoming professor in composition; he joined Brunel University as professor in music in April 2006.
Dr Bob Gilmore Role: Lecturer in Music Phone: 01895 265323 Email: bob.gilmore@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 139	Bob is a musicologist and performer and currently Head of Music in Brunel’s School of Arts. His primary interests are in the music of our own time. Bob studied at York University, Queens University Belfast (PhD 1992) and, on a Fulbright Scholarship, at the University of California, San Diego. He twice received New York’s ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, for his books on American experimental musicians Harry Partch and Ben Johnston. Bob's articles on contemporary music have appeared in Perspectives of New Music, Contemporary Music Review, The Musical Quarterly, Music Analysis, Tempo, Circuit, The Journal of Music and, in German translation, in MusikTexte. He has also written a large number of liner notes for CDs of new music for a variety of labels in the UK, Ireland, continental Europe and north America. As a keyboard player he is active with the Amsterdam-based ensemble Trio Scordatura, which he founded in 2006 to explore music using microtonal tuning systems.
Mr Frank Griffith Role: Lecturer Phone: 01895 266572 Email: frank.griffith@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 028	Frank Griffith joined Brunel in 1997 and is Director of Performance. Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1959, Frank resided in NYC from 1980-1995 and performed with Ron Carter, Mel Torme and the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He also wrote arrangements for Lionel Hampton and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Frank has recorded three CDs for Hepjazz including The Suspect, featuring trumpeter, Tom Harrell(1990), The Frank Griffith Nonet, Live at the Ealing Jazz Festival, 2000 (2001) and Holland Park Non-Stop (2011) featuring the Frank Griffith Big Band. He also recorded The Coventry Suite(2003) featuring his nonet for the 33 Records label. He has also recorded with Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine on Jazz Matters (2007 Qnote). Moving to London in 1996, Frank has received commissions from the Ealing and Coventry Jazz Festivals, the Midlands Youth Jazz Orchestra as well as The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School and Oakham School Big Bands. He is currently writing a commission for the Association for Music in International Schools (AMIS) Big Band. He has also arranged for Norma Winstone, Tina May, Tony Coe and Lee Konitz.
Dr Sarah Kingdom-Nicolls Role: Senior Lecturer Phone: +44 (0)1895 267271 Email: sarah.nicolls@brunel.ac.uk Office: GB 139	Sarah Kingdom-Nicolls is currently expanding her pianistic pursuits with the addition of live, interactive electronics, taking the already impressive grand piano into a larger scale sonic feast for the ears. Awarded an AHRC research grant, she is leading six collaborative partnerships and travelling the globe to meet experts in the field. Most recently she has been to Berlin, where she met a fellow pianistic creator, Andrea Neumann. Neumann has quite literally taken the inside of the piano out of its normal body and added microphones and numerous noise-making devices to create an entirely new but piano-related instrument. Sarah has also met up with Tod Machover from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michel Waisviez from the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam to discuss creating a new instrument with Sarah. Still in a consultation phase, this will combine all of the piano’s original innate characteristics, such as its vast natural resonating chamber and hyper-sensitive ‘action’ (hammers and keys) with electronically interactive technology. For the current project, Sarah is preparing five newly-commissioned works which she will premiere in November at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and in London at the Cutting Edge Series (see www.sarahnicolls.com for more details) on November 29th. Each work explores different technological set ups, perhaps the most extreme being a piece where Sarah will wear sensors on her arms. This allows her to control through gesture the electronic manipulation of her own playing, thus creating the greatest level of synergy between natural pianism and computer processing. She has also worked with Brunel Research Professor Richard Barrett and together they have developed a new work which so deeply entwines piano sound with Barrett’s own electronic instrument (a midi keyboard in conjunction with extra controllers) that the resulting duo promises an almost unnervingly beautiful union of sounds known and new. The contrast between the physicality of piano-playing and the cerebral world of computers is something which motivated Sarah to develop this project, specifically the desire to work with technology in an organic, natural and highly expressive way. To this end, a lot of her research has entailed looking at touch-sensitivity in midi controllers and how her pianism can be applied to these devices. Still a relatively new field – in terms of constantly developing technology – this has presented Professor Michael Clarke (from the University of Huddersfield) and the young composer Larry Goves (from the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester) with a challenging scenario. In each of these pieces, Sarah will trigger both pre-recorded sound files and live processing of her own sound. Finally, her research has also taken her into improvisational and almost theatrical considerations. For the former, she will present new work with harpist Ruth Wall, who also uses electronic processing to colour her sound. For the latter, expect electronic sounds to come out of the piano itself and to wonder how everything that you hear can come from only one pair of hands and an instrument so steeped in history as the acoustic grand piano. Some comments from the Guardian 2003-2005 ‘Sarah Nicolls brings a rare and radiant commitment to her focus on the contemporary repertoire.’ ‘Nicolls’s performance seemed a model of clarity and accuracy. There was a certainty about every gesture, a cool precision even when the music was at its most explosive.’ ‘Nicolls is a genuinely “edgy Brit”.
Harald Muenz Role: Lecturer Phone: 01895 267075 Email: harald.muenz@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 039	Born 1965 in Schwäbisch Hall / Germany, Harald studied composition under Helmut Lachenmann (1994-97), Krzysztof Meyer (1988-93), Johannes Fritsch, and Clarence Barlow, as well as in the Electronic Studio of Hochschule für Musik Cologne (Hans-Ulrich Humpert), and Cologne University’s Phonetic Institute (Georg Heike). Besides his international career as a composer of instrumental, vocal and electroacoustic music, Harald is active as lecturer and author, and is the editor of a book on Italian composer Franco Evangelisti (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 2002). He was the Artistic Director of the Electronic Studio at Musikhochschule Lübeck and from 2001-2005 he was the module leader for Aesthetic Phonetics at Cologne University. His compositions are available on several CDs. Together with his vocal trio "sprechbohrer" he is performing speech art in various formats (Wergo CD 2011). In 2005, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Music Practice at Brunel University West London as a full-time permanent lecturer with the focus on composition. He is an interdisciplinary artist commuting between Cologne and London.
Dr Colin Riley Role: Senior Lecturer Phone: 01895 266582 Email: colin.riley@brunel.ac.uk Office: Gaskell Building 026	Colin's work embraces the tension of complex and simple approaches, as well as those between the avant-garde and popular music. He is also a committed advocate of the emerging and up and coming in the new music scene. As well as being Senior Lecturer at Brunel University, Colin has been a mentor for the Making Music’s Adopt A Composer Scheme for the last eight years, director of the network for creative musicians, Music Orbit, and co-Artistic Director of the iF Festival. He is a very experienced and much sought after music-educator.
Dr Jennifer Walshe Role: Chair of Research Phone: +44 (0)1895 267868 Email: jennifer.walshe@brunel.ac.uk Office: GB108	Jennifer Walshe is a composer, performer and visual artist of whom the Irish Times has said that "without a doubt, hers is the most original compositional voice to emerge in Ireland in the last 20 years”. She studied composition at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and at Northwestern University, Chicago, graduating with a doctoral degree in composition in 2002. A winner of the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany in 2000, she returned to the Ferienkurse in July 2002 to lecture in composition. She was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart between 2003 and 2004, and from 2004-05 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York and in 2008 received the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur. Jennifer Walshe also frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques, and many of her recent compositions use her voice in conjunction with other instruments. She is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the USA. Her music has been performed and broadcast worldwide and she has received commissions from most of the major European new music festivals. Perhaps her best known work to date is the opera XXX_LIVE_NUDE_GIRLS!!! whose main characters are played by Barbie dolls. The opera was premiered in Dresden in 2003 and has received many further performances. More recent projects include Grúpat, a two-year project in which Walshe assumed nine different alter egos - all members of art collective Grúpat - and created compositions, installations, graphic scores, films, photography, sculptures and fashion under these alter egos. Jennifer Walshe says of her work that “the sounds I am interested in include those that we hear all the time but are normally considered flawed or redundant: twigs snapping in a burning fire, paper tearing, breathing, instrumental sounds that aren’t considered ‘beautiful’ in standard terms. I think these sounds have their own beauty in the way that pebbles on a beach or graffiti can have.”
Professor Peter Wiegold Role: Convenor for Postgraduate Studies (Research) and Head of Staff Research Phone: +44 (0)1895 266585 Email: peter.wiegold@brunel.ac.uk Office: GB027	Peter has been a regular conductor of the Composers' Ensemble, most recently at The Royal Academy of Art in a concert for artist Tom Phillips (2005) and in Dartington, Brighton, Bath, Oxford, Darmstadt, Salzburg and Holland. In the summer of 2002 he directed the Composers Ensemble in a Proms Portrait of Pierre Boulez in the presence of the composer. Ensembles and orchestras Peter has worked with as a conductor since 2002 include the London Sinfonietta, Endymion Ensemble, Northern Sinfonia, Southbank Sinfonia. He has also conducted at home and internationally for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Joensuu Orchestra, Symphony Nova Scotia and Orchestra Camarata Labacensis, . He is co-Artistic Director (with Colin Riley) of iF, a radical London Festival of new music and is Professor and Head of Music Research at Brunel University. He led an extended project with bcmgmixing improvisation, realisation and composition.This culminated in the opening concert of their 2004-5 seasonInvisible Cities which received outstanding reviews. Peter also worked with composer Joby Talbot and Working Title productions, creating the music for Hunky Dory, a Catherine Zeta Jones film, which was produced in Swansea and Cardiff.