This short piece started with a discovery that if you assign letters of the alphabet to A natural minor scale, surname CRANE would result in a suitably Crane-y chord, that can be heard at the beginning and the end of the piece. The rest of the piece is created from letters in LAURENCE CRANE converted into a chord row using another process.

Performed at the Festival of Laurence Crane at St Giles Cripplegate on 18 October 2021.

Piano Piece For Laurence Crane's Birthday

Listening pieces are not there to tell a story, but to encourage appreciation of sonorities. The small range of textures used to create each piece allows those hearing and playing it to give greater attention to every sound. 

Listening Piece 1357 was premiered at the RCM on Saturday 8th February 2014 by Tomoka Kan. 

Listening Piece 1357

Listening pieces are not there to tell a story, but to encourage appreciation of sonorities. The small range of textures used to create each piece allows those hearing and playing it to give greater attention to every sound.

Listening Piece 16

The caccia 'Dappoi che'l sole' by fourteenth-century Italian composer Niccolò da Perugia is cut up, and then reassembled along a new tenor backbone – the evangelical song 'We Want To See Jesus Lifted High' by Doug Horley.

I felt this would be a suitable contribution to a concert of new music for recorders – medieval instruments, taking place in a church in the 21st century. 

Volumus ut Iesus exaltetur was written for BLOCK4 (http://www.block4.co.uk) and first performed by them in 840: New Music for Recorders on the 13th of July 2015 in St James' Islington. The concert was recorded by Lawrence Dunn.

Volumus ut Iesus exaltetur

piano piece 2022

A very long time ago, my mum dedicated a poem to me, beginning:

Мой мальчик извлекает звуки
из старенького пианино.
Нанизывает их на нитку слуха
и связывает воедино.

My boy draws sounds
from a dear old piano.
He strings them on the thread of hearing
and binds them into one.

This image of a thread – of sound, and as something that connects us – became the starting point for the piece, which is dedicated to my mum.

"Thread" for two violins was premiered by Anne Yin Han and Amalia Young at New Music for Two Violins and/or Two Pianos on 20 September 2025.

Thread

Modus Triplex explores the rich, resonant sonorities that are available on three cellos, especially when playing multiple strings at once. Three pairs of strings that can be double stopped (CG, GD and DA) and the three cellos in Tre Voci meant that number 3 was a natural starting point for a simple number row (111223), from which the entire piece was constructed. 

Modus Triplex has been released on Nonclassical's 'Outside the Lines' EP 
 https://open.spotify.com/user/nonclassical/playlist/7bw0IuUACL7vS0Vc38ziES

Modus Triplex was written for Tre Voci and premiered at the 840: New Music for Cellos on 12/10/2015.

Modus Triplex

Performed at The Laughing Bell on 26.02.2016 by the Matthew Strover and Ruben Zilberstein.

Listening Piece 1215

My good friend and student Roberta shares with me a certain fascination with numerology. There is even a reproduction of a magic square (an arrangement of numbers where rows, columns and diagonals add up to the same sum) on one of the walls in her house – the square that appears in "Melancholia", an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

When tasked with writing a piece in celebration of Roberta’s 50th birthday, I decided to compose it using a simple process based on this magic square. 

The cello part goes through the rows and then columns of the square, each number represented by a note from a numbered chromatic scale. The piano part goes through the square’s 86 possible solutions, the numbers translated into notes from the major scales starting on the notes played by the cello.


Dedicated to Roberta Musillo on her 50th birthday.

Performed by Matthew Strover and Alex Nikiporenko.

86 Permutations of Melancholia

This music, composed in February 2017, is constructed from chords, textures and melodic patterns. A three-note motif, initially played by the clarinet, is harmonised in two kinds of alternating sections – one still and tactile, the other monumental and static. The character of the latter section eventually becomes expressive and flowing.

February 2017 Music was written for George Sleightholme, Emma Welton and Alex Wilson and premiered at the 840: New Music for Clarinet, Violin and Piano on 25/03/2017.

February 2017 Music

Stop, Locomotive! is a string quartet that explores the concept of train-stopping by drawing on two sources – a Russian chanson song Постой паровоз! (Postoi parovoz! - Stop, Locomotive!) and a common trait of all trains – stopping according to a timetable.

The material is an original arrangement of the chanson that is split into nine equal segments numbered 1 to 9. The train timetable (Ockley to London) is then articulated using these segments. A zero is translated into a 4-second pause.

Stop, Locomotive! was premiered at the 840: New Music for String Quartet on 06/05/2017 by the Manon Quartet.

Stop, Locomotive!

The title of the piece comes from the process behind it: permutations of a number row are converted into an ascending row of intervals (e.g. A to Z), which is then folded in half (e.g. AZBYCX). The original number row (322111) is then used to determine other elements of the piece—such as the appearance of the longer held notes. The result is this resonant, minimal piece.

"Ascending, Folded" was written for Ruben Zilberstein and premiered by him at the Örebro Contemporary Music Festival. The piece was recorded live in 840: New Music for Violin and Piano on the 16 December 2017 at St James' Islington.

Ascending, Folded

The title of the piece is taken from Lightsaber – a track by a Swedish rapper Yung Lean, whose work has been described as the “epitome of sad rap”. My piece, which is a semi-automatic arrangement of the track, attempts to convey its mood – somewhat vulgar and naive, yet with an underlying sense of sadness and emptiness.

"I Love Nature And Everything Around Me" was written for Zubin Kanga and premiered by him at 840: New Music for Piano at the Waterloo Festival on 17 June 2017.

I Love Nature And Everything Around Me

“Didn’t Even Try” is a semi-automatic reimagining of the 2014 post-R&B song “Without You” by Spooky Black, a teenager from Minnesota. INDIE Magazine writes about his music: “...it’s this beautifully dark world, the feeling of social isolation and acoustic depression that his songs bring with them. Because music makes most sense when you’re sad.” It is never clear whether Spooky’s sadness is genuine or ironic, or perhaps a mixture of the two. 

My piece attempts to translate this aesthetic into the context of a 21st-century contemporary classical piece for violin and piano. The violin’s simple, quiet melody is a lost, lone voice, whilst the piano is unsettled and fleeting, half-mimicking the violin in an unresolved, indecisive manner.

“Didn’t Even Try” was written for Ruben Zilberstein and Mateusz Rettner and premiered by them at 840: New Music for Violin and Piano on 7 April 2018.

Didn't Even Try

"Carré" is a duet exploring resonant sonorities created by open strings and natural harmonics. A simple number-based process orders the material into symmetrical music squares (16-note segments), which are themselves ordered into a larger square-like structure.

"Carré" was written for Jennifer Ames and Colin Alexander and premiered by them at 840: New Music for Viola and Cello on 7 July 2018.

Carré

These short duos for violin and piano look back at the romantic waltz idiom, gradually reconstructing its vigorously spinning character from a stark, transparent opening.

Two Waltzes were written for Angela Najaryan and Thomas Ang and premiered by them at 840: New Music for Clarinet, Violin and Piano on 22 February 2019.

http://eightforty.co.uk/events/220219/

Two Waltzes: 2. Minore

Two Waltzes: 1. Maggiore

"If number existed before music, perhaps before anything, then mathematical concepts are eternal, and music that comes from numbers is somehow connected with the infinite." - Tom Johnson

Arcs is a translation of a number row into music. The original row influences everything in the piece, from harmony and rhythm to form and instrumentation. Each movement becomes a crystal-like formation; an object that the audience is invited to appreciate the details of.

Arcs was performed by Ruben Zilberstein (violin), Zoé Saubat (cello) and Katherine Tinker (piano) at 840: New Music for Piano Trio on 14 March 2015 at St. James' Islington.

http://eightforty.co.uk/events/140315/

Arcs

Attempts At Making Peace With The Past is a string quartet series based on unfinished fragments by dead composers. The original scores are analysed in a superficial, almost topographical way, and then reconstructed using a variety of algorithms. The questions of context and composers' intentions are now irrelevant. The language of the originals loses its meaning – the notes no longer represent anything; now they are combinations of sounds that can be perceived as is, without the burden of context.

"Schoenberg" is based on a string quartet fragment by Arnold Schoenberg from 1896-97.

"Schoenberg" was premiered by Manon Quartet at 840: New Music for String Quartet on 31 January 2015.

Attempts At Making Peace With The Past - 'Schoenberg'

The last six American presidents – Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump – ruled over a period of dramatic change: from the decline and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, to 9/11 and the War on Terror, and to the growing political polarization of the recent years.

“American Music” looks at one aspect of their presidencies that is similar – their oaths of office.

“American Music” was written for Joe Qiu and James Oesi and premiered by them at 840: New Music for Bassoon and Double Bass on 9 April 2019 at Iklectik, London.

American Music

This short piece, written for Paul, is composed intuitively, without the use of processes. It reflects an evolution of my musical thinking, or perhaps a return to the way I was composing before I began feeling a need to justify my compositional decisions.

“Unrestricted Music” was written for Paul Evernden and premiered by him at The Old Church, Stoke Newington on 17 September 2019.

Unrestricted Music

In ancient China, when the Lo River flooded, the people offered sacrifices to the river god, asking him to return the water to its banks. Suddenly, a turtle emerged from the water with a curious pattern on its shell – a grid of nine squares. Each square had dots adding up to numbers 1 to 9.

The pattern became known as the “Lo Shu Square” – a 3x3 magic square where the sum of each row, column and diagonal adds up to 15. It is an important emblem in Feng Shui, the art of geomancy concerned with the placement of objects in relation to natural energy.

In my piece, the square is used to determine both the pitches and the rhythms played by the guitar trio.

“Lo Shu Square” was written for What Guitar Trio and premiered by them at 840: New Music for Guitars on 17 December 2019.

Lo Shu Square

Self-Explanatory Music III: soprano and cello was written for Juliet Fraser and Stephanie Tress and premiered by them at 840: Five Year Anniversary at Café OTO on 31 January 2020.

Self-Explanatory Music III: soprano and cello

Alex Nikiporenko is a London-based composer and curator of 840.

Alex received his formal education at Chetham's School of Music, King's College London and the Royal College of Music, where his studies were supported by a Leverhulme Postgraduate Studentship and the Derek Hill Foundation. Since 2014, Alex has studied privately with Laurence Crane. He has participated in Cheltenham Composer Academy 2014, Britten–Pears Young Artist Programme 2018, and Wandelweiser Composers Meet Composers 2019. Alex has been invited to present his work to postgraduate students at the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music.

Named BBC/Guardian Young Composer of the Year in 2008, Alex became a Creative in Residence at The Hospital Club in 2009. Alex's music has been performed throughout Europe by soloists and ensembles including Juliet Fraser, Zubin Kanga, Anton Lukoszevieze, BLOCK4 recorder quartet, Fidelio Trio, RCM Philharmonic Orchestra and Aurora Orchestra, and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Resonance FM. Modus Triplex, for the Tre Voci cello trio, was nominated for the 2016 BASCA British Composer Award and features on Nonclassical's 'Outside the Lines' EP.

In 2015, Alex co-founded 840, an experimental music concert series. Over 22 concerts the series has programmed music by 78 composers, premiering works by Laurence Crane, John Lely, Georgia Rodgers, Leo Chadburn, Lawrence Dunn and Sergei Zagny amongs many others. 840 has been generously supported by the Arts Council England, the Richard Thomas Foundation, the Hinrichsen Foundation and the RVW Trust.

Alex has collaborated with theatre group Arbonauts, creating site-specific performances at Nunhead Cemetery, Latitude Festival and Hengistbury Head, Dorset. He has composed music for fashion brand Aries’ collaboration with Vans and performed with artist Matthew Stone.

Aside from composing, Alex enjoys teaching piano and has published a book of piano pieces for older beginners. He also works as a software developer in the financial sector.

Alex Nikiporenko

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