“That kind of process has been a major inspiration for me. It led me to experiment with ways of working more collaboratively with performers, inviting them into the creative process not just as interpreters, but as co-creators.”
Manchester-based composer Simon Knighton’s work explores the boundaries between structured composition, improvisation and chaotic, semi-automated systems. The result of his work culminates in a completely unique album that challenges traditional notions of music and performance. Built from the deconstruction of traditional composer-performer relationships, Simon’s debut album Sound Sculptures, Dynamical Systems, Natural Environments — released on record label Nonclassical in 2024 — conjures gorgeous and endlessly fascinating sound palettes that feel simultaneously vigorous and transparent of his creative process.
Simon Knighton is a composer and sound artist originally from Sheffield. He is an associate composer with Nonclassical and has recently completed a PhD at the Royal Northern College of Music, under the supervision of Larry Goves and Emily Howard. Simon has written for ensembles such as Southbank Sinfonia, Riot Ensemble, Nieuw Ensemble, House of Bedlam, CoMA Manchester, and Psappha, among others; his Sound Sculpture No. 7 was nominated for an Ivor Novello award in 2023, and his Sound Sculpture No. 5 won the 2023 Royal Music Association Tippett Medal.
In support of the album, Simon presented the live installation-concert Sound Sculptures: A Dynamic Fusion of Installation and Live Performance on 11th June 2025 at The International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester. Following the concert, we asked Simon to guide us through the creative process of his debut album, working with graphic scores, Ableton, quantized loops, pendulum waves, and more…
A Shared Process
I didn’t start working with classically trained musicians until I was thirty. By that point, I had around fifteen years of experience playing in bands and recording music. So when I entered my first sessions with classical players, one thing immediately stood out: just how much direction they expected from the composer.
In the folk and rock worlds I came from, it can feel a bit heavy-handed for a songwriter to tell other musicians exactly what to play and how to play it. It’s very common for each player in the group to come up with their own part to a song someone else wrote; there’s plenty of room for individual interpretation and input. But in classical music, the opposite tends to be true. Indeed, not giving detailed instructions can come across as unprofessional or naïve — it’s expected that the composer will outline almost every aspect of the piece (or at least, that’s how it seemed to me at first). There was a steep learning curve, and I had to adapt quickly.
So then, this culture creates a long-standing expectation: the composer writes the score, and the performer interprets it. Even with the best intentions, stepping outside those roles isn’t easy. Constraints such as limited rehearsal time, tight budgets, and ingrained habits all make it difficult to shift the dynamic, and many composers and performers are aware of how deeply ingrained these traditional roles can be. This album represents the culmination of techniques I have developed over recent years that attempt to break down the boundaries between composer and performers, making the roles we take on a little more porous and open in pursuit of a process that sees creativity as something shared and distributed across the interactions of people, roles, technologies, tools and environments.
This perspective stands in contrast to the image of the solitary, heroic composer: the Beethoven-type figure, perhaps, who seemingly imagines entire works in his head and writes them down without ever needing to hear them. Compare that to the process shown in Get Back (2021), the documentary that follows the Beatles as they create their second-to-last album. It’s a brilliant example of collaborative creativity: music takes shape in real time, ideas bounce between band members, engineers offer lyrical suggestions, and the energy of the space itself transforms the sessions. Even with all the tension and friction, it’s clear that the music emerges from the group — not just from any one individual.
That kind of process has been a major inspiration for me. It led me to experiment with ways of working more collaboratively with performers, inviting them into the creative process not just as interpreters of a score, but as agents in the creative process (to use Juliet Fraser’s turn of phrase). The aim has been to find new ways of making music together that reflect a more collective, fluid, and dynamic kind of creativity.
Sound Sculpture No. 4
Sound Sculpture No. 4 was created primarily in collaboration with Gemma Bass (violin) and Peggy Nolan (cello), with a few additional samples of Chihiro Ono added at a later date.
To begin, I created a graphic score designed to encourage the performers of the piece to improvise material on the spot:
At the Royal Northern College of Music studios, I then recorded Gemma and Peggy improvising for two hours. We had a very open and creative two-hour recording session, during which we quickly established a routine whereby, one page at a time from the graphic score, one of the performers would perform a solo improvisation. Then the other player would follow with their own solo improvisation, which instinctively became not only a response to the graphic scores but also to the first improvisation. Both players would then improvise together. This resulted in a wonderfully creative, open and reactive session in which we recorded over two hours of improvised material, which I spent months working with…
I spent months listening to and editing the recordings, cutting, warping, rearranging, reversing, stretching and building sound collages from different moments. When I work with an improvisation recording, I’m listening for fragments and sounds that I can reframe, recontextualise and reshape into something new. I’m drawn to moments that feel charged with possibility: sounds that seem to carry some latent compositional potential when placed within a broader musical structure.
Some sounds naturally lend themselves to this kind of transformation, and often, the magic is in the detail. Take, for example, a flying spiccato bow stroke. On its own, it might not seem particularly remarkable. But if a violinist plays that gesture twenty times, one of those takes might hold something special: a muted resonance, a slightly unexpected harmonic, a micro-fluctuation in tempo, or a subtle shift in timbre, depending on how the bow meets the string in that instant. It’s these nuances I’m listening for. Then I ask: how can this quality be used compositionally? Can it be expanded, mirrored, or contrasted with a sound from another instrument to bring out its character? And where might it sit within the larger architecture of the piece?
The piece then went through further stages of composition. The initial draft, created in Ableton, was transcribed and developed in Sibelius. Working in notation brought a different set of qualities to the music — shaping structure, phrasing, and detail in ways that felt distinct from the more freeform digital editing process. We then held a second recording session, where I captured new variations on key material that had been selected and developed from the first session. This process generated a second batch of more refined samples and fragments: material that I could once again shape into a sprawling musical collage. The final piece quite literally contains tens of thousands of edits, which I endeavoured to make as “invisible” as possible — each one contributing to the texture and momentum of the whole.
Dynamical Systems No. 1
After completing Sound Sculpture No. 4, I decided to create some tracks that adhered to the quantization grid of Ableton and had a strong sense of looping and rhythm, deliberately contrasting with Sound Sculpture No. 4. I wanted the listener to be able to hear the edits to some degree, as opposed to the previous tracks.
Mathematical notions of dynamical systems loosely inspired these tracks, and Dynamical Systems No. 1 leans into more literally emergent behaviours through explorations of phase music. The piece is inspired by pendulum waves, which will create a variety of semi-predictable but also unexpected visual patterns.
The piece is built from over 40 loops that are played back at different tempos – each loop has a single “hit” of a percussive tone on the first beat of a 7-beat bar (with another hit on the fifth beat). The odd time signatures and irregular hits help to create interesting patterns; indeed, I experimented with numerous odd time signatures before deciding on this combination.
The chord uses a combination of synthesiser blips, guitar string plucks, glockenspiel strikes, and music box plinks as well as field recordings of a church bell from the island of Aegina, Greece, to create the unusual timbre. Composed for my 2022 concert, Dynamical Systems and Natural Environments at St John’s, Waterloo, this piece is an algorithmic electronic response to Sam Longbottom and Tanguy Pocquet’s threaded | spinning | abrading | possibly breaking (and borrows its harmony from that piece).
Dynamical Systems No. 2
Dynamical Systems No.2 was a particularly interesting track in terms of distributed creativity, as I have no memory at all of making the first half of the piece. I had COVID at this time and lay on my sofa, moving samples around in a semi-conscious daze. The track is created by layering several string samples and then processing them through various effects, including a phased amplitude chopper with randomised granulation of the samples, which causes the left and right channels to move in different patterns. And a few weeks later, I found the file and my computer, and I really liked it. It’s an interesting question to ask: Who made this piece? If the players who made the original samples were improvising, the producer who put the samples together was delirious; the computer that spat out the phased rhythms was randomised, then where is the creative agency here?
Dynamical Systems No. 3
Dynamical Systems No. 3 was the final track I created for the album, using samples of some DIY chime bells that I had taken an interest in building for an installation as part of Sound Sculpture No. 8. A video demonstration of the chime bell building can be seen here:
To create the track, I looped numerous random rhythms using each of my bells, then selected and cut out the bits that sounded good together.
Natural Environments No. 1
In September 2022, I collaborated with the House of Bedlam ensemble to create this track. I shared a series of graphic scores with them, and they recorded improvisations from their homes and sent the recordings back to me. Carl Raven (saxophone), Stephanie Tress (cello), and Kathryn Williams (flutes) were incredibly generous with the material they provided. It was refreshing to explore these ideas with a new group of players who weren’t yet familiar with my techniques.
The Natural Environments section of the album aims to bridge the dynamical systems explored in Section Two with the sound sculpture/audio sampling techniques from Section One. The goal was to create musical metaphors for the natural world. Constantly in motion, yet somehow still; never exactly repeating, yet multi-dimensional soundscapes that evolve and shift over time in both expected and unexpected ways.
Natural Environments No. 2
In Natural Environments No. 2, several instances of flying spiccato bowing techniques form the foundation of the piece. I created hundreds of looped layers of flying spiccato and applied subtle electronic glissandi to introduce gradual pitch shifts within each layer. This produced a dense texture of microtonal movement across the violin and cello parts. I shaped the track by bringing different layers in and out over time, aiming to mimic the way water rises and falls: the infinite, delicate “plink” sounds that water makes as it moves. Toward the end of the piece, I contrasted these textured layers with a sample of actual water, recorded by artist Fiona Brehony, creating a moment where the musical metaphor meets the real sound world it reflects.
Natural Environments No. 3
The final track on the album is built around two improvisations by Gemma and Peggy, with additional percussion samples recorded by Amy Gray and saxophone textures contributed once again by Carl Raven. The first half of the piece is based on material that emerged from this graphic score image:
I layered and stitched together multiple pitch-shifted versions and variations of the string parts to create a swirling texture of glissandi: a rich, shifting surface, almost like a sonic whirlpool of bowed motion.
The second section of the piece is centered around a melody that Peggy introduced during the improvisation. I reworked it slightly: adding contour and direction through notation, but it largely remains as she originally played it. I then built up several overlapping instances of the line to create a melodic texture that feels both dynamic and organic.
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Sound Sculptures, Dynamical Systems, Natural Environments is currently available on Nonclassical – stream and download the record at:
Learn more about Simon Knighton and his practice:
- https://www.simonknighton.com/
- https://www.instagram.com/knightonsimon/
- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5cPfL38OHkiDca5xGJ1FAw/
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