Christopher Fox
Honorary Professor

Profile

Biography

Christopher Fox is a composer and writer on new music. He studied composition with Hugh Wood, Jonathan Harvey and Richard Orton at Liverpool, Southampton and York Universities and was awarded the degree of DPhil in composition from York University in 1984. Between 1984 and 1994 he taught at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für neue Musik and returned to the courses to teach again in 2014. During 1987 he lived in West Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berlin Artists Programme. In 1994 he joined the Music Department at the University of Huddersfield, eventually becoming Professor in Composition. From 2006 until 2021 he was Professor of Music at Brunel University London. In 2021 he was elected to the Music Section of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

Fox’s work has been performed and broadcast worldwide. At the heart of his work are the close relationships he has maintained with the musicians and ensembles with whom he regularly collaborates: conductors Ilan Volkov and Edward Wickham, pianists Ian Pace, Philip Thomas and John Snijders, cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, soprano Elizabeth Hilliard, clarinettists Roger Heaton and Heather Roche, the Ives Ensemble, ensemble recherche, Ensemble Offspring, KNM Berlin, Apartment House and EXAUDI. Fox’s music is widely available on CD, with portrait CDs on Ergodos, HatHut, Divine Art and NMC.

His writings on music have also been published widely, in the journals Contact, Contemporary Music Review, Musical Times, TEMPO (which he has edited since 2015) and The Guardian and deal principally with new music. He was co-editor of Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart (1996, DACO Verlag, Stuttgart), a history of 50 years of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, and of Uncommon Ground, a book on the music of Michael Finnissy (1998, Ashgate Press, London). Perspectives on the music of Christopher Fox: Straight lines in broken times (edited by Rose Dodd) was published in 2017 by Routledge.