Howard Skempton, composer, accordionist, and music publisher, was born in Chester in 1947. His studies in London with Cornelius Cardew from 1967 led him to a musical language of great simplicity. He later became a founder member of the Scratch Orchestra with Michael Parsons and Cardew. He has more than 300 works - many of them miniatures for solo piano or accordion. Skempton calls these pieces “the central nervous system” of his work.
While Cage, Cardew, Feldman and LaMonte Young have been important to him at different stages, Skempton has remained independent of all mainstream trends in new music. His work is in the experimental tradition, characterised by an extreme economy of means, a concentration on essentials and an absence of rhetoric, drama and decoration. He draws inspiration from a range of extra-musical sources, including Constructivism in the visual arts, with its emphasis on material and form. Working with chosen limits, discovering internal detail within a defined structure, he is concerned with the sound-material itself, rather than with expansion and development.
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