Christopher Hobbs

Christopher Hobbs (born 9 September 1950) is an English experimental composer, best known as a pioneer of British systems music. Life and career 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 experim