James Black was born in 1990 in Torquay, England, where his parents were attending a business conference. He grew up in Bristol, where he played saxophone and clarinet in local bands and ensembles. He was a member of the National Youth Wind Orchestra, playing bass and E-flat clarinets, and achieved a DipABRSM qualification in saxophone performance from the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music.

At 18, James started his studies in music at Oxford University. He initially intended to specialise in saxophone performance, taking at the Royal College of Music in London alongside his studies at Oxford. However, he changed to composition towards the end of his Bachelors, and decided to remain at Oxford for another year to pursue composition further, under the tutelage of Robert Saxton. After a year in London working at St Paul’s Boys’ School, he moved to Copenhagen to study for a masters at the Royal Danish Academy of Music. On completion, he was accepted into the Soloist Class programme, and currently plans to take his debut in 2018. At the academy he has studied with Hans Abrahamsen, Bent Sørensen, Jeppe Just Christensen and Niels Rosing-Schow, as well as electroacoustic music with Hans Peter Stubbe Teglbjærg. His music has been played worldwide in places such as Iceland, China, the US, Italy, Poland, as well as the UK and Denmark.

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Artikel fra Seismograf.org 2018

My music is focused on creating and maintaining trance states, playing with energy and balance, using numerical systems to create fractal patterns, and walking a line between the expressive and the mechanical. I often employ my personal adaption of Per Nørgård’s infinity series, based on a misunderstanding that happened when I tried to exactly replicate the system. It is not Per Nørgård’s system - it is wrong, but it is consistently wrong. 

Performance

The idea of performance is dominant in everything I do. I am strongly focused on the act of performance - whether that means playing with expectations of the concert situation, exploring the state of mind of a listener within the concert, the idea of writing music as an act of performance in itself, or even literally performing my own music. In recent years I have returned to the saxophone as a means of personal expression, and started performing some of my own works. I have also begun building and inventing instruments and exploring electronics as a means of broadening the technique available to the player.

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