This site offers recordings, many of which have never been released before, of works by Samuel Beckett, Morton Feldman, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew and Howard Skempton, as well as solo improvisations and collaborations with, amongst others, Derek Bailey, Keith Rowe, Eddie Prevost, Joelle Leandre, Marcus Schmickler, John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, Owen Ambarchi, Mark Sanders, Wadada Smith, John Edwards and Bertrand Gauguet.
BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN
John Tilbury was born in London in 1936 and educated at Latymer Upper school in west London. He was awarded a piano scholarship to the Royal College of Music where he studied with Arthur Alexander. He subsequently became a pupil of James Gibb and then went to Warsaw on a Polish government scholarship where he studied with Zbigniew Drzewiecki and co-founded the Warsaw Music Workshop group with Zygmunt Krause. In 1968 he was a prize-winner in the Gaudeamus International Competition in Contemporary Music in Holland and since then has specialized as a performer of contemporary music.
He has given countless concerts and broadcasts of new music, including premieres, in many countries around the world. His solo recordings include Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (from the seventies) and more recently the music of Cornelius Cardew, Howard Skempton, Christian Wolff and the complete solo piano works of Morton Feldman. His recordings with the Smith Quartet of the complete works for piano and strings were released on Matchless Recordings. His performances with Carla Rees and Simon Allen of Feldman’s mammoth For Philip Guston, and with Carla Rees of for Christian Wolff, were released on the Italian Atopos label.
Through his membership of AMM he is also well known as an improvising musician, with a large body of recorded work available on Matchless Recordings. More recently he has gained recognition for his adaptations of the works of Samuel Beckett, including radio plays and the late works: Stirrings Still, Worstward Ho, and What is the Word.
Tilbury’s biography of the life and work of Cornelius Cardew, Cornelius Cardew – a life unfinished, published at the end of 2008, was short-listed (of two) for the Royal Philharmonic prize.
All John’s contributions to AMM are on the Matchless label, as are compositions by Dave Smith, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, and the music for Samuel Beckett’s Cascando.