composer

Michael Finnissy was born in 1946 in London, started composing aged 4, and was self taught until he gained a Foundation Scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1965, where his principal teacher was Bernard Stevens. Whilst there he secretly planned that his future work would gradually assemble a complete, intensely personalised, history of world music, representing (sometimes ironically) all periods and genres. His ideology and aesthetics are influenced by composers Erik Satie and Charles Ives, painters David Hockney and Robert Rauschenberg and by the progressive underground cinema of Markopoulos, Brakhage, Jack Smith, Warhol, Pasolini, Jarman and Godard. He served as president of the ISCM/IGNM from 1990 to 1996. His work has also focussed on non-professional music-making, with CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) in London and Maastricht. He has taught at Dartington Summer School (UK), and the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (Boston USA), and at the Katholiek Universiteit in Leuven (Belgium), the Royal Academy of Music (London), University of Sussex, and the University of Southampton (UK) where he holds an Emeritus Professorship in Music. As pianist he has given more than 300 world premières, touring and broadcasting worldwide.

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