Music Biography
photo by LB
Lawrence Ball is a versatile and innovative composer who has a multiple focus as a composer,improviser and audio-visual creator. He has collaborated with healers, therapists and counsellors as well as writing for dance, film, orchestra,and choir and is as much at home writing a score as creating electronic or computer music. In summer 2008 he completed his 2nd Symphony, currently he is working on the third (2013). He collaborated with Pete Townshend and software engineer Dave Snowdon on the Method Music project, designing music software for a web server which generated over 10500 musical pieces – ‘portraits’ – over the internet. Pete Townshend also helped Lawrence record a double album “Method Music” now available through Amazon on CDs or through Amazon or iTunes as a download. You can hear longer samples on iTunes.
His work is largely tonal (in the sense of an identifiable set of notes that are emphasised – rarely changing the key, central note). It is contemporary, in that it has much in it which is formed anew – not directly influenced or inspired from the classical music tradition. It is often associated with meditational or New Age aspects, because of the strong emphasis on its relationship with silence and presence, it makes more use of the space between notes than occurs in classical music. It is in the minimalist genre, in the sense that it borrows the idea of looping and repetition (since over 35 years) from the musical innovations of Terry Riley and LaMonte Young, and seeks deeper experiences through working with constancy, with sustained sounds and small or zero contrasts.
Since 2001 Lawrence has worked with sarod player Lisa Sangita Moskow and vocalist Manickam Yogeswaran on improvised music based on North and South Indian raga scales. He has created 5 multi-media audio-visual installations with the artist Genie Poretsky-Lee: including Anonymous Words (2007) and Image Of Sound (2008).
He has developed techniques to deeply integrate audio and visual images with quantum physicist Michael Tusch, collaborating on this since 1993 with Dave Snowdon who created the software “Visual Harmony” to explore this arena; worked with healer/counsellor Isobel McGilvray in shaping harmonic tonescapes to aid relaxation, and has worked with choreographers/dancers (ex-Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet) Sheila Styles and (ex-Ballet Rambert) Rebecca Ham on several dance projects. Lawrence Ball has written for the pianists Yonty Solomon, Mark Swartzentruber, Tim Ravenscroft (2 suites), and Alessandra Celletti (Fractal Studies and Mist Sculptures), for The Smith (string) Quartet, the Electric Symphony Orchestra, , the female vocal quartet led by Rosemary Forbes-Butler, Rosy Voices, and he wrote 6 pieces for the violist Robin Ireland (of the Lindsay Quartet) and many more for violist Neil Davis.
He composed music for the film “The Eye Of The Heart”, a portrait of the life and work of the artist Cecil Collins, and features in the book on Collins and his circle by Nomi Rowe. He has recorded almost 4000 piano improvisations as well as performing many live. Ball’s creating in acoustic and electronic media, in composed and improvised methods is one of the broadest of any composer. He has performed in Canada, the US, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Switzerland, France and Germany as well as in the UK. He has accompanied the international painting group Collective Phenomena who work ‘more than one to a canvas’ with marathon keyboard improvisations, at John Calder’s La Fonderie in Paris and The Blackie in Liverpool, as well as a Planet Tree Festival London appearance. Ball is a pioneer in music, having addressed meditative and healing presence and state-of-mind, primarily, for over 44 years. In 1996 he founded the Planet Tree Music Festival, which he also directs. He is also a highly sought after private tutor in mathematics. He lives in London.