Martin Arnold (composer)

Martin Arnold (born 19 August 1959 in Edmonton, Alberta) is a Canadian composer of experimental music.

His music has been widely performed and commissioned by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, the pianist Eve Egoyan, the violinist Mira Benjamin and the cellist Anton Lukoszievieze.

Komorous developed the aesthetic with musical colleagues in the Czech Republic before emigrating to Canada in 1969.

According to Komorous, another translation of the Czech word for wonderful is strange.

Composers influenced by the aesthetic seek to create musical encounters with the unexpected.

Arnold's music is characterized by a sense of dislocation and discontinuity, effects which are created using atonal melodies and novel combinations of instruments and timbres.

It is generally slow-paced and characterised by a drifting, directionless quality, which he terms "slack".

He has said of his own work:"'All the music I make is in some way melodic. I also think of all of it as being slack, meandering, psychedelic and, even at its most ponderously enervated, dance music. Moby once said of The Flamingos’ version of 'I Only Have Eyes For You' that, along with being a beautiful performance of a beautiful song, it sounded like it was recorded underwater in a Methadone clinic. Even at its clearest, my music somehow aspires to this ideal.'"The sound of Arnold’s music is also influenced by his wide-ranging interests in music outside the spheres of experimental and classical music, such as mediaeval polyphony, 1970s progressive rock, jazz-lounge music, and Scottish folk music.

Arnold studied at the University of Alberta, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (1981-82) and was a guest student at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (1982-83).

He completed a PhD at the University of Victoria in 1995.

Arnold currently lives in Toronto, where he lectures at Trent University and York University, besides working as a landscape gardener.

He performs regularly within the city’s free improvisation and experimental music communities on melodica, hurdy-gurdy, prepared autoharp, real-time manipulated and processed CD player and banjo.

A formative influence during Arnold's studies was the Czech-Canadian experimental composer Rudolph Komorous, to whose aesthetic Arnold has attributed "a skewed critical sensibility… [that] could embrace any musical background or predilection".

Arnold has written about the influence of Komorous' "aesthetic of the wonderful" on his music.

Significant works by Arnold include Burrow Out; Burrow In; Burrow Music (1995), a 110-minute work realised with recordings made in a variety of spaces of instruments including baroque flute, melodica, recorders, saxophones, brass, whistling and electronics including electronic panpipes and MIDI pianos.

The work was significantly influenced by the work of filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Arnold’s 40-minute work Tam Lin (2010), a setting of the Scottish ballad of the same name, was written for a combination of improvising trio The Draperies and experimental music ensemble Arraymusic.

Writing of this work in The Wire magazine, the journalist Tim Rutherford-Johnson described this piece as "stretch[ing] its source material almost beyond recognition, the ending of each sumptuous multi-vocal phrase becoming a vehicle for increasingly langorous instrumental improvisations".

Tam Lin was released by the label Autumn Music in 2010, together with the work for violin and electronics, Cameras (1997), performed by Marc Sabat and Fergus (2000) for melodica and electronics, performed by the composer himself.

Arnold's music is available on the UK-based record label Another Timbre, who released recordings of his works for violin and piano, Points & Waltzes (2012), Slip Minuet (2014) and The Spit Veleta (2015). His works for string quartet were recorded by Quatour Bozzini in 2012.

A weekend devoted to performances of Arnold's music, entitled of-the-now, was held in Victoria, British Columbia, in 2017.

Arnold’s most recent large-scale commission was The Gay Goshawk (2019), written for the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, alongside improvising soloists Angharad Davies and Sharron Kraus.

It was premiered at the Tectonics festival in Glasgow and subsequently broadcast by BBC Radio 3.