Text Music: About Bob Dickinson

Difficult to categorise, the music of Bob Dickinson is perhaps best described as 'melodic minimalist'. During the mid-1970s he collaborated with Sheffield-based electronic music pioneers Cabaret Voltaire on the multi-media piece 'Vietsong' and played keyboards with seminal new wave band Magazine, contributing the song "Motorcade" to the album 'Real Life'.

During the 1980s he eschewed rock music and presented a number of systems-based pieces in gallery environments and initiated projects with artists from other disciplines. During the 1990s an interest in "earth spirituality" resulted in a series of non-linear pieces of a ritualistic nature for performance in a variety of natural environments using a combination of natural and humanly-produced sound. These activities led to the publication by Capall Bann in 2001 of his book 'Music and the Earth Spirit'. This was an investigation of the ways in which music and sound have been used in different cultures to connect with the "earth spirit". It also contains "sound workings" - short text-based pieces which can be used as guidelines for musical performances in the environment.

Of late Dickinson has returned to more "traditional" compositional methods, working in large resonant spaces in order to "magnify" the underlying tonal basis of the music. Recent projects have included collaborations with the artists Mary Barratt at Southwell Minster ('Trinity') and Stephen Morley at the Haven Arts Centre, Boston, in addition to larger-scale electronic music installations such as 'Light into Dark' presented at the '20-21' Gallery, Scunthorpe in December 2004. The latter was a cyclical work inspired by an overland journey to Tibet. Current activity includes an ongoing series of instrumental pieces with Haiku titles commencing with 'Just by being, I'm here – in snow-fall'.