English composer and pianist Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) has served as a professor at the Royal Academy of Music, the University of Sussex, and is currently Professor of composition at the University of Southampton and Composer in Residence at St. John’s College Cambridge. His works for the piano are especially notable for their extreme technique demands. He is concerned with the political aspects of music, and believes that all music is programmatic to some degree. That is, a composition exists in not just the composer’s mind, but inside a culture that reflects both the extra-musical and purely musical concerns of the composer. “My music contains many musics, but impure, misremembered, smudged and melted, torn apart yet not completely erased.” (Michael Finnissy) “Michael’s music is gnarly, gristly even- one senses keenly that it is the product of an intellectual yet instinctive wrestling with the very philosophy of music.” (Juliet Fraser)