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Howard Skempton : Soto Voce
"Soto Voce requires alertness and lightness of touch rather than great techical facility. The piece is a canon, the violin and cello (both pizzicato throuought) playing a couple of beats behind the piano. Each melodic variation dissolves seamlessly into the next"

Biography

Howard Skempton was born in Chester in 1947, and has worked as a composer, accordionist, and music publisher. He studied in London with Cornelius Cardew from 1967 and Cardew helped him to discover a musical language of great simplicity. Since then he has continued to write undeflected by compositional trends, producing a corpus of more than 300 works, many pieces being miniatures for solo piano or accordion. Skempton calls these pieces 'the central nervous system' of his work. A number of his works have been recorded, including the hugely successful Lento for orchestra on the NMC label by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and the piano compilation Well, well, Cornelius performed by John Tilbury on the SONY Classical label. Skempton is currently writing chamber works for various commissions having recently completed a Concerto for Oboe, Accordion and Strings, which was premièred and toured by the Camerata Roman of Sweden in March 1997. Skempton was featured composer at the 1997 Norfolk and Norwich Festival, where two new works were performed: Ballade for saxophone quartet and string orchestra, and Arioso for solo cello. In 1991 he was Visiting Lecturer in Composition at the University of Adelaide, South Australia and in 1996-7 was the Artistic Director of the Society for Promotion of New Music.

Many of Howard Skempton's works are available through Oxford University Press

Other works of limited technical difficulty by Howard Skempton

Many of Howard Skempton's works are not technically difficult to play and are available through Oxford University Press