Good morning, afternoon or evening whoever and wherever you are.
Thank you for investigating this web-site: I hope the following information about my compositions is of interest. If you wish to contact me directly then e-mail me at nicholas@sackman.co.uk.
"Nicholas Sackman is the PR man's nightmare. He's not into minimalism or religion, he doesn't include didgeridoos or zithers in his music - and to cap it all, he has a very unsexy name. What he does have is that elusive and unpackageable quality, integrity."
The writer of the above demonstrates considerable acuity in his fingernail portrait of my public profile. Born in 1950, I have always composed when I have felt that I had something to say rather than racing to complete commission after commission in an unholy desperation to remain on the treadmill of popularity. Predictably, whilst this has produced musical results which have been enthusiastically endorsed by a few knowledgeable commentators, performances have not been as frequent as might have been expected.
"[Sackman] ... an original composer whose work owes little to any of the fashionable schools, and who, if never exactly ignored, has never been more than sparingly acknowledged."
My music was published for a period (by Schott & Co. Ltd.) but, like so many other composers, I now operate without house-support - hence this web-site.
I read Music at the University of Nottingham followed by two years at the University of Leeds with Alexander Goehr. There followed fifteen exhausting years in school-teaching (in retrospect, this was not a good career-move) before I made my return to the university environment with a lectureship at Nottingham (from 1990). I am still at the Music Department, teaching Composition, Electronics and Sound-Recording.
Unfashionably, I believe that music ought to be a robust enough art-form not to have to prostitute itself on the altar of commercial hype. I also believe that there are performers and listeners 'out there' who want to do more than just wallow in synthetic romanticism or just attend concerts merely to be aurally comforted. As a society we seem to have exchanged the (dubious) assumption that 'if you can't remember anything about the music then it must have been good' for a blind acceptance of 'anything goes' [but only if you take nothing as your starting point].
Unlike any of the other arts, music, by the nature of its concert-hall performance-environment, sets its own agenda - the listener cannot walk away once the piece has started and come back later (at least, not unless one is an admirer of Cageian irrelevance). That being the case, it is frustrating to hear new pieces from the flavours-of-the-month which waste that unique opportunity to provoke the music-audience both intellectually and emotionally.
I would like to believe that my own works offer immediate pleasures as well as strong enticements to listen/perform again. I have been pleasurably surprised how often I have received genuinely enthusiastic comments from performers of my works (never mind the heavyweight critics) but, of course, little attention is ever paid to the deliverers of musical visions.
My music is ambitious and places much responsibility on both performers and listeners. Those qualities are not popular today - and possibly never will be again - but I can only compose to my artistic ideals.
"Perhaps because his work seems to be unspectacularly well made and sturdily individual he has lacked the easy glamour of many of his contemporaries."