Martin Arnold (composer)
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Martin Arnold (born 19 August 1959 in Edmonton, Alberta) is a Canadian composer of experimental music.[1] His music has been widely performed and commissioned by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Quatuor Bozzini, the pianist Eve Egoyan, the violinist Mira Benjamin and the cellist Anton Lukoszievieze.[2][3][4] Arnold won the €35,000 Open Ear Prize for Music Composition in 2025, awarded by the Oscillating Ear Foundation.[5]
Arnold studied at the University of Alberta, the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (1981–82) and was a guest student at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (1982–83). He completed a PhD at the University of Victoria in 1995.[6]
Arnold currently lives in Toronto, where he lectures at Trent University and York University, besides working as a landscape gardener.[1] He performs regularly within the city's free improvisation and experimental music communities on melodica, hurdy-gurdy, prepared autoharp, real-time manipulated and processed CD player and banjo.[1] Arnold won the £35,000 Open Ear Prize in 2025.
Musical style
A formative influence during Arnold's studies was the Czech-Canadian experimental composer Rudolph Komorous, to whose aesthetic Arnold has attributed "a skewed critical sensibility… [that] could embrace any musical background or predilection".[7] Arnold has written about the influence of Komorous' "aesthetic of the wonderful" on his music.[8] Komorous developed the aesthetic with musical colleagues in the Czech Republic before emigrating to Canada in 1969. According to Komorous, another translation of the Czech word for wonderful is strange. Composers influenced by the aesthetic seek to create musical encounters with the unexpected.[9]
Arnold's music is characterized by a sense of dislocation and discontinuity, effects which are created using atonal melodies and novel combinations of instruments and timbres. It is generally slow-paced and characterised by a drifting, directionless quality, which he terms "slack".[10][3] He has said of his own work:
"All the music I make is in some way melodic. I also think of all of it as being slack, meandering, psychedelic and, even at its most ponderously enervated, dance music. Moby once said of The Flamingos’ version of "I Only Have Eyes For You" that, along with being a beautiful performance of a beautiful song, it sounded like it was recorded underwater in a Methadone clinic. Even at its clearest, my music somehow aspires to this ideal."[11]
The sound of Arnold's music is also influenced by his wide-ranging interests in music outside the spheres of experimental and classical music, such as mediaeval polyphony, 1970s progressive rock, jazz-lounge music, and Scottish folk music.[1][12]