Staff profile

Ian Dickson studied music at King’s College, London (composition with Harrison Birtwistle, awarded the Purcell Prize); the University of York (MA and PhD in composition, supervised by Prof Roger Marsh, supported by the AHRC); and the University of Cambridge (PhD in musicology, supervised by Prof Nicholas Cook). He attended compositions courses at Apeldoorn and Royaumont, directed by Louis Andriessen and Brian Ferneyhough. He worked as a supervisor at Cambridge for many years (composition, analysis, history). His music has been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the pianists Satoko Inoue and Rika Zayasu, the violinist Clemens Merkel (Bozzini Quartet) and the shō player Ko Ishikawa; and has been broadcast on BBC radio. His published articles appear in the journals Music Analysis and Twentieth-century music.

• Twentieth-century and contemporary music
• Modernist and avant-garde aesthetics
• Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988)
• Music and language, music semiotics, music and metaphor, musical grammars

Chapter in book

• Dickson, I. (2019). Small ensemble and solo instrumental works. In Giacinto Scelsi: Music Across the Borders (99-130). Brepols Publishers

Journal Article

• Dickson, I. (2012). Towards a Grammatical Analysis of Scelsi's Late Music. Music Analysis, 31(2), https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2249.2012.00336.x
• Dickson, I. (2009). Orality and Rhetoric in Scelsi's Music. Twentieth-Century Music, 6(01), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1478572210000046