Neil Goodchild.

The following abstract is from a paper about one of my works titled: At the Piano.

Towards a New Popular Classical Music:
New Tonal Works for the Piano

From 1993-1997 I conceived a collection of piano works that I hoped might come to act as a bridge between the classical and contemporary worlds of music. This was motivated through my enquiry as to whether it would be possible to attract a greater mainstream audience to the classical genre through a series of original compositions that pointed in that direction. Before I began; however, I realised that two significant aesthetic issues had to be addressed in regards to the ensuing compositional style. The first arose when I asked myself what were the well-known and publicly appreciated works that had helped shape the Australian culture in the same way that the works of the European Classical Masters of the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods had? Finding little to none, I then turned to the second issue and considered the reception of the work of various twentieth century composers and realised that their styles would not auger well for my goal to create a music that might help popularize classical music. What emerged was a collection of 35 new works for solo piano titled, At the Piano.