ABSTRACT
Despite the relatively small number of written discussions about Christopher Fox’s music, it has already become something of a cliché through these and in verbal discussions over the years to cite Fox as a composer who inhabits no single stylistic abode. Philip Clark’s profile of Fox begins with the caption ‘a British composer whose music is impossible to categorize’ and goes on to slyly suggest ‘He’s a minimalist, maximalist, central European, conceptual, pastoral, German, English composer/sound artist’.1 Ian Pace, in the first major article on Fox’s music, wrote ‘It is near-impossible to talk of a “Fox-style”; his music stands at a distance from styles and genres, interacting with many but embracing none’.2 Fox himself has written:
I have always been suspicious of ideology, which is one of the reasons why I resist the categorization of my music. In the 1980s, I suffered the possibly unique distinction of having my work critically pigeonholed as both ‘minimalist’ and ‘complex’ and, more recently, I have found myself labelled as a ‘microtonal’ composer. Terms like these come into existence because initially they provide a helpful shorthand in critical debates, but they also have a limited useful life, usually less than a decade, after which they are as much a hindrance as a help to constructive discussion.3
