Post-HIP is a name I proposed in 2021 for an emergent scene of composers and performers making new music with the instruments of Early Music – viols, harpsichords, cornetts, organs – in ways that come after, and build on, Historically Informed Performance practice (HIP).
Between 2020 and 2025 I pursued the idea as research, including through my own composing. A radio series gathered interviews with post-HIP’s practitioners; a journal article set out the field; and my doctoral thesis, Renaissance Synthesisers, developed frameworks for composing and performing with Early Music instruments through pieces including A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time, Earth of the Slumbering and Liquid Trees, and Glass Coloured. A post-doctoral research residency at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama then developed this work into the field of ‘Augmented Musical Instruments’ (AMIs), fitting a virginal with sensors and electronics.
Outputs
Post-HIP: New Music for Old Instruments in the Twenty-First Century
Article, Tempo 75 (297), 2021
Proposes post-HIP as an emergent field of contemporary music, surveying composers and performers who write for and play historical instruments today, among them the lutenist Jozef van Wissem and the Baroque violinist Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir.
Renaissance Synthesisers: New Frameworks for Composition and Performance with Early Music Instruments
PhD thesis, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, 2024. Supervised by Joe Cutler, Jamie Savan, and Andrew Hamilton; funded by AHRC Midlands4Cities
Asks what new compositional and performance vocabularies arise from experiment with Early Music instruments, creative technologies, and mixed and digital media, through a portfolio of new works.
Future Renaissance
Radio series, Resonance FM, 2020–21
Conversations with the composers and performers making new music with Early Music instruments.
Bad Death Ghosts
Microtonally tuned spinet and lap steel guitar, 2022, 12′. Musique moléculaire, 2025
A concert work exploring the quarter-comma meantone tuning of the lower manual of Nicola Vicentino’s sixteenth-century microtonal harpsichord, the archicembalo. Vicentino’s nineteen-note octave is stretched across the keys of a 1960s spinet, and the piece draws on the temperament’s very pure thirds and narrow, beating fifths.
Glass Coloured
3D-printed Renaissance cornett and live electronics, Jamie Savan, 2023, 12′. Birmingham Record Company / NMC, 2024
Composed for the cornettist Jamie Savan, in three movements, each exploring a different tuning system: the natural overtone series, a circle of pure fourths, and the cornett’s enharmonic pitches. All of the sound is produced live, the laptop freezing, resonating, and echoing the cornett. The instrument is a 3D-printed copy of a treble cornett bought for Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, in 1605.
The Augmented Harpsichord
Research residency, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 2024–25
A virginal augmented with Arduino circuits, pressure sensors, and custom electronics, so that the player’s touch and movement shape live electronics. Developed with postgraduate harpsichordists at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.