Morris Pert

Morris David Brough Pert (8 September 1947 – 27 April 2010)^[1] was a Scottish composer, drummer/percussionist, and pianist who composed in the fields of both contemporary classical and jazz-rock music. His compositions include three symphonies, piano music, chamber and solo instrumental music, choral music and "sonic landscapes" for electronic media; a recent major work is "Ankh" for Carnyx and electronics. He was born and raised in Arbroath where he played in percussion, folk and rock bands and began to compose. After a BMus from Edinburgh University, he studied in London on a scholarship at the RAM with Alan Bush and James Blades. He was a prize winning student, notably for his orchestral work "Xumbu-Ata". He worked with Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamashta and was a member of the ensembles "Come to the Edge" and "Suntreader" and later the jazz-rock band Brand X, composing three numbers for their Masques album. As a session musician he played with many musicians, including Paul McCartney, Andrew Lloyd Webber, John Williams, Kate Bush, Mike Oldfield, Sally Oldfield, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Elvis Costello. A truly original composer, he eschewed the excesses of post war modernism, believing sound and emotional communication to be of fundamental importance; his style is nevertheless marked by a degree of rhythmic and metric complexity and a non-ideological use of serial technique that remains open to aspects of tonality. Another important feature of his music is the degree of improvisation required of soloists,generally in response to a pre recorded tape. The extramusical stimuli were often cosmological, ranging from generally solar or lunar themes to the more specifically astronomical: "Alpha Centauri", "Omega Centauri", "Chromosphere" etc. or inspired by the wisdom, culture and artefacts of the ancient and medieval world, especially his Pictish forebears, but also drawing on Lucretius, Taoism, witchcraft lore and the Bible.

References

1. ^ - Accessed 11 October 2010

Morris Pert released 5 cds The Voyage (Suntreader unreleased adbum) The Music of Stars Desert Dances Elektron Musik - available from his web site as a burn to order cd Chromosphere - available to purchase as a download - i tunes

External links

• Official website
• Morris Pert at Allmusic

Persondata
Name	Pert, Morris
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	8 September 1947
Place of birth
Date of death	27 April 2010
Place of death