I am a composer and lecturer interested in the relationship between recorded electronic music and live performance. I work in experimental forms of electronic and rock music, as a solo artist under the pseudonym ‘Spectra’ and in a rock band setting. My music incorporates influences from noise, ambient, glitch, rock, electroacoustic music and notated musics in the European classical tradition. I teach piano and guitar privately and lecture on the Popular Music and Sound BA and Masters courses at the Academy of Music and Sound. The journey I took to teaching these subjects began in my teens when I played guitar in rock bands at school and studied piano at home. This continued with the study of classical and notated musics at the University of Edinburgh, where I specialised in notated composition and the performance of late romantic and early modernist piano music. During my Masters at the University of Oxford, my interest shifted towards non-institutional forms of electronic and experimental music (noise and ambient in particular), interests which developed and clarified during my doctoral research at Royal Holloway. This journeying between the poles of institutional and non-institutional music practice, between popular and classical, means that my composition teaching is pointedly non-dogmatic and student-focused. I am interested in helping each student develop their voice in whichever musical style or compositional approach appeals to them, to chase innovation and interest wherever they find it and to argue for the value and intentions of their creative practice.

Currently, I am working on indeterminate systems for improvisation and the relationship between studio work and live practice within a 3-piece rock band context.