In my multitudinous conversations with Anselm of Canterbury, countless Scholastics greater and lesser, notably Radulfus Ardens, Berthold of Moosburg and of course Hugh of Newcastle whose fair skin and blue eyes prevent him from taking the sun, I have suffered ongoing bun fights, in which, to his disgrace if I’m honest, my erstwhile colleague René Descartes has chosen to participate. I am often chastised for the perceived fault of indecision that I, a mere composer, find to be virtuous in its application to solving problems. We may all well disagree but at my behest we continue to debate the matter. I often hesitate before writing, not knowing where to start, so I start at the beginning yet some would have it that even this defies logical precision and dialectical reasoning. Happily my friend and fellow composer Giancarlo Toniutti and I have corresponded by email for over a decade. We have also met in person and indeed worked together on musical projects small and large, great and good. But the bulk of our engagement has been by letter, he in Italy, me in Scotland. The outcome? Love them as I do, I have less need of medieval thinkers.

Working with electroacoustic music requires that I adopt a completely different approach to working with the acoustic guitar in terms of research and formulating a theoretical background to how and even why I work (an amplified electric guitar with pedals offers something else entirely, maybe something in-between, and I’ll come to that in due course). Although the electroacoustic music that I compose is non-academic, meaning it probably wouldn’t get played at an academic concert, it requires and benefits from the same depth of research that underpins the more academic music. I’m fortunate in having a PhD in electroacoustic composition because I can apply the same depth of research to my work, as appropriate, and enrich it as a result.

For those new to electroacoustic music I work at a very basic level with microphones and loudspeakers. Recorded sounds from different sources are processed, in my case using only basic editing along with equalisation/ filtering and time stretching/pitch-shifting. It's much more compoluacted than that as I'm sure you appreciate but that's it in a nutshell. Then I take a long time (often more than necessary) working with the sounds I’ve selected to create music, typically works of between thirty minutes and one hour. 

 In case you’re wondering this is leading up to personal theories of music.
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Someone asked me recently how or why I work with two seemingly unrelated kinds of music-making, electroacoustic composition and playing guitars. The simple answer is that I don’t want to waste all those hours I spent as a child and youth learning and practising classical guitar music in my bedroom. But that’s by the way. 

​Another way round this is to consider that different kinds of music require different kinds of research. Some of course require none, in the sense of academic research. You just play, though there will undoubtedly have been a wider social dimension to that playing which implies some sort of  knowledge base or layered background. On an instrument that I’ve played for most of my life I can play from memory, from a score, improvise from a few ideas or improvise freely. Many musicians can do this quite easily, it’s no big deal. There’s not too much in the way of different sounds to be drawn out of an acoustic guitar, unless we get into amplification, effects and preparations which aren’t typical of the instrument. Any research tends to focus playing and listening or on the histories and traditions of the instrument and its players, a rewarding field of study in its own right. 

It's evident to me that many musicians, especially composers, require a working theory or even a simple hypothesis of what music is in order to proceed with some measure of artistic or even personal integrity. I’m one of those musicians. More specifically however it depends on what musical activity I’m involved with. If the main concern is to explore sound, generally speaking, meaning the extraction or coaxing of sounds and their sonic particularities from various generators in order to investigate these and compose or perform using them, then I’ve found it essential to think and act in a certain manner, one that requires support. Over time therefore I’ve benefited from adopting a theoretical perspective, meaning an evolving process rather than a fixed standpoint.