biography

Born in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Amber Priestley has lived in the U.K. since 1991. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Sussex, and has recently completed her doctorate in composition at the University of York with Bill Brooks and Roger Marsh. Some recent performances include: Then You Are In Clover (students/staff of Queens' College, Cambridge; Queens' College, Cambridge commission); Such Nights I Get All The Free Margins (Damien Harron; spnm commission); and The Spider Woman's Magic Formula (Endymion, Aruna Narayan & Hanif Khan; spnm commission).

The majority of her work deals directly with musicians performing both music and theatre. Some of this forms a very small portion of the performance (for example, choreographed page turns) or a fundamental portion of the performance (such as where the music is the least important element, with the focus on the various movements of the musicians).

Another of her major preoccupations lies in open-form scores. In 1932, the American photographer Edward Weston wrote that photography "is not all seeing in the sense that the eye sees…Our vision is in a constant state of flux, while the camera captures and fixes forever a single, isolated, condition of the moment." As in photography, most concert music is also an attempt to define a certain time (in music it is the length of the piece of music). This certain length of time will be very similar each time it is experienced in most music. Amber is interested in trying to allow again for a possibility where time is not fixed, and each time a piece is experienced, the music has the chance to be different. The other separate reason that Amber is interested in open-form scores is that she would like, without use of traditional jazz-style improvisation, to allow for the performer's own individuality to emerge through her scores.

Amber is particularly fascinated by the visual aspect of a completed score, especially simple but elegant staves which are, in fact, stripes! She finds these stripes to be æsthetically pleasing and add to the joy of composition.

In the years following her PhD, Amber's music has been funded largely through her work as a civil servant with DEFRA and by weekly payments from the DSS.