Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs (born 9 September 1950) is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British Systems music.

Hobbs was born in Hillingdon, near London. He was a junior exhibitioner at Trinity College, London, then was Cornelius Cardew's first student at the Royal Academy of Music from 1967. Hobbs worked with Cardew and Christian Wolff: he joined AMM, appearing on two albums: The Crypt and Laminal.

In 1969, Hobbs was a member from the first meeting of the Scratch Orchestra, and, as its youngest member, designed the Scratch Orchestra's first concert, at Hampstead Town Hall on 1 November 1969. His early composition Voicepiece, part of his Verbal Pieces group, was used often enough to be called a Popular Classic in the Scratch Orchestra nomenclature.

As experimental music was hard to come by, Hobbs gathered sheet music from friends and founded the Experimental Music Catalogue in 1968 as a distribution centre. Various pieces were eventually grouped into a series of Anthologies according to themes: the Verbal Anthology (of text-notation music), Keyboard, and Educational Anthologies are typical. These anthologies published works mainly by British experimentalists, but also works by Christian Wolff, Frederic Rzewski, Terry Jennings and other American experimentalists. After a few years, Hobbs was joined by Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman in the operation of the Catalogue, which lasted in its original form until the early 1980s.

Hobbs was a founder-member of the Promenade Theatre Orchestra (PTO), with John White, Alec Hill, and Hugh Shrapnel, a group of composer-performers that specialised in music for toy pianos and reed organs. On the breakup of the PTO (for political reasons, as Shrapnel and Hill wanted a greater political content in the works played and Hobbs and White did not), Hobbs and White formed the eponymous Hobbs-White Duo, which lasted until 1976. He also took part in several momentous one-off concerts, most notably in a complete performance of Erik Satie's Vexations with Bryars in Leicester.

...
Wikipedia