Tim Parkinson
Tim Parkinson (born 7 July 1973) is a British experimental composer, pianist and curator. His music has been commissioned and performed by groups like Apartment House, the Basel Sinfonietta and the London Sinfonietta, and by soloists such as Anton Lukoszevieze and Rhodri Davies. It has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM, WDR3 in Germany and Radio SRF 2 Kultur in Switzerland.
He co-curates the concert series Music We'd Like to Hear with John Lely, a project running since 2005; before that he organized concerts at the British Music Information Centre in London from 1997 onward.
Parkinson went to Bedford School, studied at Worcester College, Oxford, and privately in Dublin with Kevin Volans. He took part in Ostrava Days 2001. In 2011 he was a visiting Professor of Composition at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno and has taught at Ashmole Academy. In 2018 he became a creative fellow at the Samuel Beckett Research Centre at the University of Reading.
His music is often described as melodic with a “Sixties” feel, using a collage approach that mixes found sounds, various musical materials, and snippets of speech. Parkinson explains that he seeks a wide and surprising variety of pitches and patterns, and that he is inclusive about tones, mixing consonance and dissonance. He sometimes uses pages as building blocks for a piece and lets performers choose their own order of pages.
He has written music for installation art projects, such as sixty eight sounds for Welborne (2005) and an untitled installation for Sound 323 (2003), as well as music for a London record shop and ten brass for St. George’s Gardens in Bloomsbury. Much of his work has practical, descriptive or untitled titles, and his official website is untitledwebsite.com.
Since 2003 he has been part of the duo Parkinson Saunders with James Saunders, performing indeterminate music that uses everyday objects as sound makers, with the players seated at two tables like newsreaders. Parkinson also performs as a solo pianist and occasionally with ensembles like Apartment House and Plus-Minus, at venues such as Tate Modern, the Barbican and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.
His recordings have appeared on labels including Edition Wandelweiser, Another Timbre, Metier and Lorelt. His album Pleasure Island (May 2019, Slip Imprint) is his first work designed as a full album, named after the Land of Toys from Pinocchio. His second solo album, Here Comes A Monster, followed in May 2020 on Cafe Oto’s Takuroku imprint, featuring many guest artists.
Parkinson’s opera Time With People (2012–13) has been staged widely around the world, with performances in London, Huddersfield, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oberlin, New York (by Object Collection) and Brussels; a French translation has been staged in La Chaux-de-Fonds and a German version was planned for 2019. The opera uses little traditional instrument sounds, often performed on a stage crowded with rubbish that also provides sound sources, including walking, speech, clapping, humming and found recordings. Reviewers have called it “robotic incantations,” “theatre of the absurd” and imagined it as what opera might be like without a conventional orchestra.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 01:12 (CET).