Bob Dickinson

Bob Dickinson (b. 1955) is an English composer, writer and sound-artist. He studied music at Sheffield University and Keele University (1973-77). During the mid-1970s he worked on early realisations of The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars for performances in Sheffield and Manchester and in addition worked on versions of Completely Sweet by Jean-Yves Bosseur and Repertoire by Mauricio Kagel. At this time he also collaborated with Sheffield-based electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire on the multi-media piece Vietsong and played keyboards with seminal new wave band Magazine, contributing the song "Motorcade" to the album Real Life 1. Extra-curricula work whilst with Magazine included a side-project with [...] Witts, later of The Passage, deconstructing classic songs from the punk era. Previous work with [...] Witts had included the composition of a solo percussion piece, 'She was only the drum-majors daughter but she knew how to beat a retreat', which was premiered at The Spring Theatre in Hull in October 1976 by The Option Band and 'Death of the Maiden' for the 1977 International Festival of Mixed-Media in Ghent, Belgium.

During the 1980s he presented a number of systems-based pieces in gallery environments and initiated projects with artists from other disciplines. During the 1990s an interest in "earth spirituality" resulted in a series of non-linear pieces of a ritualistic nature for performance in a variety of NATURAL environments using a combination of natural and humanly-produced sound. These activities led to the publication by Capall Bann in 2001 of his book Music and the Earth Spirit. This was an investigation of the ways in which music and sound have been used in different cultures to connect with the "earth spirit". It also contains "sound workings" - short text-based pieces which can be used as guidelines for MusicAL performances in the environment.2

Of late Dickinson has returned to more "traditional" compositional methods, working in large resonant spaces in order to "magnify" the underlying tonal basis of the music. Recent projects have included collaborations with the artists Mary Barratt at Southwell Minster (Trinity) and Stephen Morley at the Haven Arts Centre Boston in addition to larger-scale installations such as Light into Dark presented at the '20-21' Gallery, Scunthorpe in December 2004. The latter was a cyclical work inspired by an overland journey to Tibet. Current activity includes an ongoing series of instrumental pieces with Haiku titles commencing with Just by being,I'm here - in snow-fall3.A CD of recent compositions has been released on the Heartsounds label.

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