Born in 1956 in Birmingham, Paul studied composition with Anthony
Gilbert at the Royal Northern College of Music and privately with
Bill Hopkins. In 1999 he was awarded a PhD by University of
Edinburgh, supervised by Nigel Osborne and Peter Nelson.
In 1977, his
Concerto for Groups of Instruments
won the Royal Philharmonic Society Prize and in 1978 his
Music for Wood and Strings
won the silver medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians.
However, the most important work of this period is
The Ruin, set to part of the Anglo-Saxon poem.
The Ruin
is a 'double time refraction' evoking the strong, though not
specific, sense of place which permeates his later composition.
Paul's fascination with nature underpins all his music, and his
tireless quest for scrupulous honesty in his writing led him to
investigate a range of scientific phenomena. The beating wings of
swans in flight were woven into the rhythms of
Palimpsest; the pitches rendered from their calls. Nonetheless, it was the
mathematics of a rainbow which developed into Paul's groundbreaking
research into trombone 'lip' multiphonics, and the musical ideas
thus generated were, like the rainbow, to have no end!
A Field of Scarecrows
was consequently based on the multiphonics discovered in birdsong;
Squaring xlvii
on spectral analyses of the vocal sounds of the poem, used with the
kind permission of Seamus Heaney.
All this attracted the interest of Border Television, where film
director Peter Chapman was intrigued by the overlap between art and
science. He made a documentary about how Paul's research 'fed into'
his compositional technique and its relationship with the natural
world. The programme, which included a complete performance of
Cloudscapes, was broadcast in October 1998.
In 1999, Paul was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, but he continued
to compose. His last piece,
I quattro libri dell’architettura, is a musical 'map' of Paxton House and its grounds, where he
lived with his family. He died on 26 June 2001, aged 44.
Since his death, Paul’s music has gained increasing recognition and
appreciation with numerous performances in the UK, Europe and
America, in addition to radio broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 and in
Europe. Most important of all was the world premiere and broadcast
of
Palimpsest, in which the pioneering sound world of the electronics were
described as: 'thrilling surges of sound ... like listening to Bach
played on a cut-glass organ in an enchanted cathedral'.
Concerto for Groups of Instruments
was performed and broadcast by BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under
Garry Walker, and
A Field of Scarecrows
has been extensively toured in Britain, Europe and America,
broadcast on radio, and is available on CD.
In 2015,
Cloudscapes
received its US premiere in the prestigious Monday Evening Concert
series in a programme curated by Paul Griffiths celebrating the
music of Barraqué and his musical descendants. Griffiths also refers
to Keenan's
Palimpsest
in his latest edition of Modern Music and After.
Other performances include
The Ruin
by Chimera Ensemble at the University of York and numerous
performances of
Cloudscapes
for Ballet Bewegung, choreographed by Jane Keenan.
Comet Hale-Bopp, the work Paul considered his finest, still waits to be performed.