Works performed by Earplay:

Line Study
1958-1961

Alexander Hillsl is a composer, pianist and teacher, based in London. His music has been played at events in in the UK such as the Cheltenham Festival, the London Sinfonietta State of the Nation Weekend and the Cutting Edge series, at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall and the South Bank Center to the Bethnal Green Working Mens’ Club, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and the German SWR, and recorded on the American Innova label. Recent collaborators have included the Berlin-based Ensemble Mosaik, the cellists Kwesi Edman and Lucy Railton, and the pianist Zubin Kanga. He is currently working on a large project based on ideas from the Russian futurist movement that will be performed in London in 2009.

From 1998 to 2004 he lived in California, studying first at the University of California, San Diego, and then Stanford, completing a doctorate supervised by Brian Ferneyhough, and working there as a lecturer. Before that he was a student at the Royal Academy of Music, where his teacher was Michael Finnissy, and an undergraduate at the University of Exeter.

He is now a full-time lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music, where he teaches analysis, keyboard skills and musicianship classes. He also teaches piano and, rather improbably, writes a monthly review column on rock and pop music for Clash Magazine.