Pete Stollery
Composer · Sound Artist
"Curious about how sound and place relate to each other."
Pete Stollery (Halifax - UK, 1960) studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST in the early 1980s. Following a number of years as a school teacher in Kent, he moved to Aberdeen to work in teacher education at the former Northern College, which later merged with the University of Aberdeen.
From 2000, he was part of the team which re-introduced music programmes at the University of Aberdeen, including the introduction of doctoral programmes in composition and the development of the electroacoustic music studios. He was Head of the Department of Music for many years, and he retired as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music in 2022, when he became Emeritus Professor of Music. He spent over thirty years living and working in the northeast of Scotland, and in early 2024 he moved to Skipton, North Yorkshire.
In 1996, along with Alistair MacDonald, Robert Dow and Simon Atkinson, he established the group invisiblEARts, whose aim is to perform acousmatic music throughout Scotland and to promote Scottish acousmatic music to a wider audience, both within Scotland and abroad. In 2004 he was part of the setting up of sound, a new music incubator in the northeast of Scotland that runs an annual festival of new music featuring composers and performers from around Europe, as well as year-long activity including opportunities for composers and performers of all stages. He chaired sound from 2012 to 2024 and is again a board member. He is also artistic director of Any Enemy, northeast Scotland's new music ensemble.
Stollery composes music for concert hall performance, particularly acousmatic music, and more recently has created work for outside the concert hall, including sound installations and internet projects. His main interest is in how humans respond to sounds in their immediate surroundings, in particular sounds that are not necessarily intended for listening purposes, as well as how an engagement with sound relates to the idea of place. His creative work exists as electroacoustic compositions, sound installations, web-based sound art, and instrumental and vocal compositions.
His music has been presented widely, including at Bangor New Music Festival, the International Computer Music Conference, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Akousma in Montréal, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, L'Espace du Son in Belgium, KLANG! in France, Sonic Matter in Zurich and Sonic Nomads in Seoul. His music is published by the Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes.
Photo: Spud ‘n Duck
Highlights
Phantomnesis selected artist, Cambiata Arts; Featured in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces
Emeritus Professor of Music, University of Aberdeen (Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music, 2007–2022)
One of the first members of BEAST, the Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre
Co-founder of invisiblEARts (1996) and of the sound new music festival in northeast Scotland (2004)
Music published by empreintes DIGITALes, Montréal
Special Prize, Musica Nova International Electroacoustic Music Competition (1994, Shortstuff)
Second Prize, CIMESP '97, São Paulo International Electroacoustic Competition (Altered Images)
Nominated, Scottish Awards for New Music (Pipeline 2016; Stolen Voices 2018 and 2021; COVID-19 Sound Map 2021)
Finalist, Prix Russolo 2026 (Sandhaven Jetty)
Juror, Prix Russolo (2019–2025) and Musica Nova, Prague (2016–2021)
Selected works
Clermont Horns (2020) — fixed medium, 5.1, 4'31". Made from a single field recording of car horns heard in Clermont-Ferrand in November 2018, during the first weekend of the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations. Composed at VICC, Sweden, and part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Jonty Harrison.
Quiet City (2022) — fixed medium, 8 channels, 12'12". Commissioned by sonADA (Sonic Arts Days in Aberdeen) for the Under the Skin project. He crowdsourced Aberdeen locations where the sound had changed since the 2020 COVID-19 restrictions, then moved from recognisable soundscapes to transformed, non-real-world ones. Performed in Aberdeen, Gars am Kamp (Austria), Chiang Mai, Seoul and San Francisco.
Gruyères Bells (2022) — fixed medium, ambisonic, 5'26". Made from one recording of a herd of Red Holstein cows wearing bells, made in Gruyères, Fribourg, Switzerland, on 16 July 2015. Part of Aides… mémoires…, and performed at KLANG! (Montpellier) in 2022.
Cullykhan Water (2020) — fixed medium, 5.1, 4'. Part of the Aides… mémoires… project with Jonty Harrison.
Azet Gate (Squeaky) (2023) — fixed medium, ambisonic, 4'07". Part of the Aides… mémoires… project.
Sandhaven Jetty (2026) — fixed medium, ambisonic, 4'13". Made from a recording of a floating jetty in Sandhaven Harbour, NE Scotland. Part of Aides… mémoires…, and finalist in the Prix Russolo in 2026.
Stolen Voices — fixed medium, 8 channels, 10'. Presented at the Edinburgh Fringe, Sound & Image (University of Greenwich) and ICMC in 2017, and nominated for the Scottish Awards for New Music in 2018 and 2021.
Pandemonium (2021) — fixed medium, ambisonic, 12'49". Commissioned by BEAST. Made entirely from sounds in the COVID-19 Sound Map, it imagines an instrument that holds sounds recorded during a pandemic and has the power to transform them.
Three Cities (2013) — fixed medium, stereo, 10'45". Commissioned by sound. Part of the Three Cities Project, with Suk-Jun Kim and Ross Whyte (SERG, University of Aberdeen), linking the audio cultures of Aberdeen, Bergen and St Petersburg. Finalist, Musica Nova, Czech Republic, 2013.
Of the Swan (2014) — fixed medium, 5.1, 7'07". Part of Aberdeen Bestiary: Sound-Image-Narrative, an artistic research project led with Suk-Jun Kim, placing the University of Aberdeen's Bestiary collection in imaginative aural settings.
Back to Square One (2007) — fixed medium, stereo, 10'17". Commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique de Bourges and composed at Studio Circé. Built from 2007 radio sports commentaries (Grand National, cricket, tennis, rugby), woven with a Parisian bar crowd from the 2006 World Cup. Appears on Scènes (empreintes DIGITALes, 2011).
Still Voices (2005) — 6'22". An acousmatic and soundscape concert piece, part of a project with Fields of Silence and the sound documentary Resound. On Scènes (empreintes DIGITALes, 2011).
scènes / rendez-vous — 18'11". Appears on Scènes (empreintes DIGITALes, 2011).
Serendipities & Synchronicities (2004) — 5'48". Appears on Scènes (empreintes DIGITALes, 2011).
Altered Images (1995) — 11'51". Awarded, and included on Un son peut en cacher un autre (DVD-Audio, empreintes DIGITALes, 2006).
Onset/Offset (1996) — 7'20". Plays on the interplay of recognisable sounds and their purely sonic qualities. Released on Un son peut en cacher un autre and included on Electroshock in 1999.
Shortstuff (1993) — fixed medium, stereo, 9'44". On Un son peut en cacher un autre, and on Sonic Art from Aberdeen, Glasgow, Huddersfield and Newcastle.
Vox Magna (2003) — 12'36". Awarded, and included on Un son peut en cacher un autre.
Clermont Horns
Phantomnesis selected work
"Car horns smearing into harmony, recorded in Clermont-Ferrand on the first weekend of the Gilets Jaunes demonstrations."
Pete Stollery is one of the composers selected for Phantomnesis, an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition and heritage-rooted works. His piece Clermont Horns is included in the compilation Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces. The call sought pieces that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten and the reimagined. It welcomed works that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening.
An international jury of six professional composers, performers and researchers reviewed each submission. Their own careers embody the premise of the call. Each has spent years bringing overlooked musical systems, regional practices and reimagined traditions into contemporary listening. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz and Klagenfurt in Austria. Their practices range from electroacoustic composition and open-source technology to somatic voice and live electronics, traditional Thai instruments, artistic research and jazz scholarship. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness and its artistic conviction. The works in the compilation emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
In France, there is a cultural tradition of taking to the streets to demonstrate, particularly when the government makes a decision that does not sit well with one or more sectors of the population. The tradition has endured since the revolution and persists to this day, as can be seen by the current (Oct 2026) demonstrations by school students demanding an overhaul of current thinking around school education. Perhaps the best-known of demonstrations in recent times are those organized by the Gilets Jaunes movement in the late 2010s. Angry at projected increases in road fuel prices in 2018, its members donned the yellow gilet jaune, the yellow hi-vis jacket that all French drivers must carry by law, and took to the streets in their cars.
On 17 November 2018, Stollery was in Clermont-Ferrand gathering data for a project with photographer John Perivolaris and writer Ed Welch. He heard the sound of car horns in the distance and immediately reached for his recording device, entranced by the harmonies of the constantly smearing horn sounds. At that point, they did not know that this was the first of the many Gilets Jaunes demonstrations.
The piece is made from one single field recording. It forms part of Aides… mémoires…, a project with Jonty Harrison consisting of short form pieces (3 to 6 minutes) made from single field recordings. Clermont Horns was composed in Studio Alpha at VICC (Visby International Composers Centre) in Sweden in 2020.
Stollery's main interest is in how humans respond to sounds in their immediate surroundings, particularly sounds not necessarily intended for listening, and in how engagement with sound relates to the idea of place. His music is acousmatic: it plays with the interplay between the original meaning of sounds and sounds existing purely as sound, divorced from their physical origins.
He has taken this listening outside the concert hall. His projects include sound maps, sound walks and web-based sound art, among them the COVID-19 Sound Map (nominated for the Scottish Awards for New Music in 2021), the Aberdeen soundsites for Public Art Aberdeen (2012) and the National Parks Sound Map (UKAN+, 2022). His pieces Stolen Voices and Quiet City have travelled to festivals in the UK, France, Thailand, Korea and the USA.
His current project is Aides… mémoires…, a series of short form pieces made from field recordings that he and Jonty Harrison have gathered over many years. It includes Clermont Horns, Cullykhan Water, Gruyères Bells and Azet Gate (Squeaky).