The Book of Fixed Stars: an interview with composer and pianist Charlie Hooper-Williams
The career path most highly-trained classical pianists frequently choose for themselves is clearly defined: train with the best teachers, practice like mad, enter and win competitions, and (hopefully) launch a career on the world’s stages playing standard repertoire. Pianist and composer Charlie Hooper-Williams challenged this script. After becoming a prize winner at the International Shostakovich Piano Competition, he reassessed his path. He taught piano. He did some composing. Eventually he pursued a different career in tech where he was one of the creators of the app Shazam. But despite his success as a creative coder, he knew music was what he was called to do. He returned to the piano, but not to the world he’d inhabited as a classical competition winner. He composed his own music. He created a live projection system to enhance his concerts. Today he has established a reputation as a performing artist who creates immersive live shows that combine piano with generative visuals and custom-built instruments.
Classical piano, composition, and technology come together in Charlie Hooper-Williams latest album, The Book of Fixed Stars. Each lyrical piano solo invites listeners into a musical story—one told through elegant piano lines that are enriched with subtle, multi-layered ambient and string tracks. The result? Piano solos that contain whispers and suggestions of hidden depths lurking beneath engaging melodies. In Charlie Hooper-William’s musical hands, sound and imagination combine, ushering us into a space where our own imaginations can soar. It is an honor to feature him on No Dead Guys.
At what age did you begin learning to play the piano and what drew you to the instrument?
I remember being on the floor as a very small child, maybe 3 or 4, holding the pedal down, putting my head in the piano and just being surrounded by sound. My parents had got an old-but-beautiful upright piano from their landlord, and I loved to play around with it, picking out tunes on the keys but also taking the cover off and hitting the strings to get all kinds of sounds out of it.
I didn’t take formal lessons until we moved to Colorado, when I was 6. In Minnesota my family had been pretty poor, so when piano lessons became an option my parents signed my sister and me up. Both of my parents had wanted to do music as kids, so they were glad to be able to give us that opportunity.
How old were you when you began writing music and what was your first composition?
My first-ever composition was a tune for one of the songs Bilbo sings in The Hobbit. Tolkien has loads of songs in those books, but of course there’s no tune, so you get to make up whatever you like! I remember humming a tune to myself and figuring out how to write down the notes on staff paper. The first time it’s so much work! Then, just like writing English, it flows more and more until having an idea and writing it down just feels natural.
I understand you started your career as a classical pianist and that you were a prizewinner at the International Shostakovich Piano Competition. When did you decide to focus on other styles of music and what influenced that decision?
Even as a classical pianist, I played in bands in middle school and high school, as well as at university. When I arrived at university I was struck by how much the top pianists had focused exclusively on classical for their entire childhood— Juilliard pre-college chamber music sessions and so on— and it was pretty clear that I was never going to be, for example, a world-class Mozart interpreter. There’s also the thing where as a child or young adult you tend to want to do EVERYTHING, and not really have perspective about the many different areas of specialization within “being a musician”.
Over time I found I was excited about new music, and good at playing it. A lot of that comes down to repertoire selection— there isn’t as much of an established body of work from the 20th century as there is from earlier periods, where we’ve more or less forgotten a lot of the lesser works and have these massive concert warhorse pieces that get played tons because they’re really effective masterworks. So I really enjoyed finding composers like Rzewski and Corigliano who wrote exciting concert music that was in a “20th-century style” but had a tunefulness and was fun to play, and connected with a non-specialist audience. Those things are really important and when new music doesn’t include those I don’t think it can be successful outside of a very small audience of specialists.
After the Shostakovich competition I didn’t really know what to do next— if you’d have asked me I would have said I wanted to start a concert career, but I think one of the reasons the “concert pianist” career didn’t go further for me is because part of me knew it wasn’t quite the right fit. There’s a real danger in life in achieving something that’s close to the right thing for you, but not quite the right thing, because humans are really good at convincing themselves of things.
So for a little while I had a piano teaching studio, and played in some bands, and then I got this job teaching music tech for the film scoring program at Columbia College Chicago, which had just started up. I’d been a fan of film music for a while, and scored a few student films, and that was a great chance to learn more about the art. That opened up my ears to a lot of great film music and really helped develop a love of film for me as well. But I think the biggest thing was realizing that even the more “accessible” new music I was playing was pretty out-there compared with what “normal” people listen to and enjoy. So when I started composing again, my priority was to write music that could connect with any audience, but that still had meat and substance to it, from a compositional perspective.
In addition to your award-winning musical career, I read that you helped create the app Shazam. How long did you work in the tech world and what drew you back to composing and performing?
When I moved to the UK I didn’t anticipate how disruptive it is to leave your entire network and have to build a new one. It took a couple of years to get on my feet really, but the big thing that moved me into the tech world was getting a master’s degree. I had been doing a fair amount of “music tech” which grew organically into coding. So I had an idea to go back to school as a “pivot” degree, which would set me up to work in tech.
Annoyingly, one of the things pushing me into this was the government visa policy. As much as I detested it at the time, the requirement to earn a proper living in order to stay in the country did force me to reach higher than I might have otherwise, and it ended up landing me the job at Shazam.
Shazam was an amazing gig, they had a great team and I learned loads about writing large-scale software used by hundreds of millions of people. There’s something magical about building a feature and then a week later there are people all over the world using it. One of the big wins there was making the “listening” screen react to the music— before that, it just was a basic animation, but I thought it should actually animate differently based on the sound. So I did a little mockup of it and then we built it into the app. That had a really great reception. It’s a sign of a well-functioning organization that a design idea doesn’t have to only come from designers, this was a design idea that came from tech.
I left Shazam because my wife had sold her first novel. That’s the sort of thing that can buy you anything from a largish round at the pub to, well, in our case it was time to buy a house. And you can get a lot more house outside of London, so we were looking at moving back to Bath, where a lot of our friends were. Today, with remote work being common, I might have stayed on the team, but at the time I would have had to be on a train back into London at least four days a week and that’s no way to live. So we parted amicably and a few years later Apple acquired them, so a happy ending for all.
I kept working in tech for a few years, but increasingly I felt an itch, a sort of sad nagging feeling that I wasn’t really doing what I’m called to do. As I became more of a software consultant I was able to free up time to start composing again, and then started performing those new compositions.
Although I hadn’t been focused on music for a while, my musicianship had actually developed quite a lot in that time, which I largely put down to singing Sacred Harp music. If you’re not familiar, it’s an a capella singing tradition from the American South, which in turn grew out of the English 4-part tradition. It comes from an intensely religious culture, but one of the mores of singing it is that you don’t really ever talk about what you specifically believe— whether you’re doing this as a form of worship or “for fun”. From the outside it kind of looks like a choir, but key to it is that there’s no director, and no rehearsal/performance distinction. Every week you get together and sing, and that singing is the thing you do; you’re not preparing for a performance or anything. And there’s also no rehearsal: you go around the group and each person picks one song out of the book, you sing it once, and then the next person picks a different song. So you’re always singing something pretty fresh, which takes a great kind of focus. And you sing really loud, because that connects you with the sort of euphoria that they’re after the quickest. So it connected me with music residing in my physical self in a way that I’d never experienced before. Other composers (notably Caroline Shaw) have referenced Sacred Harp, which I think is no coincidence: it’s almost a concentrate of what’s missing from other ways of learning or doing music.
One of the things that intrigues me about your career as a musician and creative coder is the ways you’ve found to combine both interests, most notably with Otto, the custom-built live projections system you created. What is Otto and what does it do?
The system that eventually became Otto started after I recorded The Sea Was Never Blue, which was my first album of solo piano music. I had bought a Yamaha C2 Disklavier at auction, so a nice grand piano which also has MIDI sensors in the keys. I’d seen these used at university to do wild experimental algorithmic-generative type performances, and I liked the idea of being able to mess about with that sort of thing at home. But the simplest thing was just that as I recorded my music, I could also record the MIDI data. So I ended up with an exact MIDI rendition of the music on the album.
Then, at a residency in Sweden, I started playing around with different ways to visualize that data. At first I was just reading in a MIDI file, but soon I thought: there’s no reason this couldn’t happen live, this algorithm could just be getting a live stream of notes and creating these visuals as the performance happens.
I was fortunate to get a Project Grant from Arts Council England which let me develop the system into something I could perform live. This culminated in a performance at St George’s Bristol, in their Glass Studio. Going into the performance it felt like ‘the beginning’, but as soon as the performance finished I realized that what I had built was a prototype: it was really fiddly to work with, it took ages to make changes, and I would always have to have a MIDI-equipped piano in order to perform.
I guess it was good timing that Covid came along when it did, because the retooling happened at a time when there weren’t any performances happening anyway. I had written the ‘prototype’ in C++ but had then learned about this program called TouchDesigner, which is a coding environment specifically based around live visuals. Reworking the set in that language has made it possible for the set to grow and gain a level of polish that it wouldn’t have had before.
At some point along the way I had the idea that the system should have a name— I say it feels almost like playing with a conductor, because the machine— Otto—has a machine-readable version of the score for each piece and is following along, so I can play freely, but within certain parameters. There’s a vision for each piece, and Otto follows along not just note-by-note, but in terms of the larger-scale architecture of the piece as well.
You’re becoming known for immersive live shows that combine piano with generative visuals and custom-built instruments. How do you translate that experience into your recorded works?
It’s a challenge because the live show has this unique element of the visuals, but I think the music still stands up as “just” music, i.e. the compositions have depth to them. Part of being a ‘postclassical’ pianist, or whatever we call this genre, is that you’re free to place your music in whatever kind of sonic world you like. “Trad” classical is more about capturing what a solo piano would sound like in a concert hall, more or less, whereas I include not just strings but electronics and effects.
This album is a big step for me in a few ways, but one of them is consolidating my sound. I’ve found a brilliant bass synth that I bring in occasionally as almost just a structural element— it’s always just doubling my lowest left-hand note, but it’s so satisfying to have that extra low energy come in at important points.
So I think there’s a way that music in this genre, even when it’s clearly classically-influenced, is conceptually very close to more popular music, because the recording itself is ‘the work’ in that there are elements in the recording which form part of the experience, but they weren’t notated prior to fixing the recording in audio form.
Congratulations on the release of your latest recording, The Book of Fixed Stars. Given the multi-track texture of most of this music, how much did you draw on your technology background to compose this music?
Most of my composing happens the old-fashioned way: I sit at the piano and come up with ideas. Often I’ll capture them in a voice note on my phone, because my memory can be extremely goldfish-like at times, and then I’ll write them down properly. I find the initial development of an idea is golden: if I work it too much it can lose the spontaneity that it has right at the start. And then once I’ve written the whole thing down I can polish and rework while keeping that fresh feeling of a new idea.
As far as using technology to compose, often times people will ask if I compose anything generatively, or they even expect that I’m using algorithms to compose somehow. I find generative music absolutely uninteresting and I don’t anticipate I’ll ever turn over my compositional decisions to chance, or to a computer. For me as far as it goes is recording voice notes, and then of course putting my handwritten score into the computer.
Most of these pieces would work beautifully as stand-alone piano solos. How do you feel the string tracks add color to your music?
Thank you! I agree that these are fundamentally piano pieces, with strings adding texture, rather than being a piano-and-strings composition from the ground up. As I said before, the recorded track as final product (as opposed to, or maybe in addition to, the score as final product) means there are lots of opportunities to build a sound world around the piano piece. On this album it’s my wife Emma who plays viola, and she’s a great improviser, so we more or less just recorded all the string parts in an afternoon with her playing something, and me saying “what if you tried…” and so on. At some stage I want to write more properly for instruments beyond piano again, but I very much value how a home recording studio can let you create something intimate and relaxed that still holds up in terms of engineering and mix quality.
Of all the pieces I enjoyed on this album, “February Clears Up” is my favorite. I was particularly taken with your use of textural contrasts. Did you “prepare” some of the piano’s notes in order to achieve this effect? If so, what did you use?
Good ears! Yes, the opening bell-like note of February Clears Up is the first use of my “harmonics machine”, a device I’ve developed that lets me play specific notes as artificial harmonics, while keeping both hands free to play the keyboard.
I’ve always loved harmonics and was envious of string players having such easy access to them! But the standard way of playing harmonics on the piano means you have to stand up and put one hand inside the instrument, meaning you only have one hand to actually play the keys. I worked with an incredible maker called Drew Batchelor to take this from a literal napkin sketch to something that’s easy to tour with and safe for the piano. This is key of course because when you’re putting it in a massive concert grand the venue can get a little bit worried. But one of the things we decided is that the only materials touching the piano are those that already go inside the piano— felt, and in the case of the bits touching the strings, modified piano tuning wedges. So there’s no chance of damaging the instrument.
“Emma” is a beautifully haunting piece. What can you tell me about your inspiration for it?
The seed for “Emma” came actually from something my wife Emma played on the piano just before bed one night— she’s primarily a violist but will improvise on the piano, and the opening gesture just immediately unlocked the idea for the rest of the piece. As a pianist, I’m always wanting to write things that really use my technical skills on the instrument, but that’s not always musically important or even appropriate. As a composer, I value simplicity alongside things like expressivity, lyricism and structure, so for different pieces there’s a different balance between them. I think my most-streamed piece so far (“The River’s Tent Is Broken”) is also my simplest— and was also written late at night, just before bedtime! So maybe that’s a productive time for this kind of music.
Will you be offering sheet music for this music? If so, where might we purchase it?
Yes! One of the great benefits of working with notated music, and being slightly obsessive over how it looks— even when it’s just me looking at it— is that creating sheet music involves basically no extra work.
I have two volumes of sheet music which are available on Bandcamp and also on Amazon. This includes everything on the new album!
I’m very pleasantly surprised at how well these sell— I suppose one thing is that there’s a wide range in terms of how ‘accessible’ the pieces are: some of them are very simple and others are more ‘athletic’ for the pianist. So even if you’re just getting started as a pianist there’s something there for you. Still, playing sheet music isn’t exactly something everybody does these days, so I’m very encouraged by how many people want to get the books and play the music themselves.
What I’d love to encourage more is for people to post videos of themselves playing the pieces at home and tag me in it! I think often people are shy to do this, but it makes my day whenever I can see a piece having a life out in the world.
What current and future plans are you most excited about?
I’m so excited to get this album out into the world, first and foremost. With any big project like this there’s a gap between finishing it and the actual release— you sign off the masters, and then there’s a whole bit where the label has to do artwork, order physical media, slot it into their release schedule etc. Which is all kind of exciting, it’s moving toward the big moment of putting it into the world, but the actual release is the best part and the point of it all— sharing the music with the world.
Beyond that I’m looking forward to getting back on the road and touring more in 2026 and beyond. We’re looking at more dates around the UK, but also going to Europe and possibly even the USA. Those are tentative but hopefully they’ll come together, I’d love to bring the show farther afield.
I’m also very excited about recording more with the harmonics machine! It opens up lots of sonic possibilities on the piano and I’m looking forward to exploring them more.
What advice can you offer people who seek to create hybrid careers in music and technology?
This is a great time for hybrid careers— despite AI (which is its own whole conversation) there’s lots of demand for software/tech type work, and it’s generally remote and flexible in terms of scheduling, so it can sit alongside a creative career. One great thing about tech: like in music, no one really cares what qualifications you have on paper. It’s all about Can You Do The Thing. So if you want to get into tech, it still might be helpful to study formally, but really you just need to build something interesting and show it to people. When I’ve been in charge of hiring junior developers in the past, the ones that have a real personal project with actual users are a thousand times more likely to be hired than anything else they could do.
And the same goes with music: no one’s going to be interested in potential, but people will really respond to something that’s creatively honest, interesting, and just great art.
Composer and pianist Charlie Hooper-Williams performs “beautiful” (Times Radio), “soulful, richly layered” (Nick Smithson) music which is “masterfully understated and laced with a magnetic sense of melody” (Archodia).
A prizewinning former concert pianist, he combines intricate, virtuosic textures with soaring, stirring melodies. Originally from the pine woods of Minnesota’s Iron Range, he grew up near Chicago, studied at the University of Cambridge Centre for Music and Science, and now makes his home in Bath.
Hooper-Williams adds to the piano a set of custom-built machines which create new sounds: his “harmonics machine”, and “infinite resonator” shape the instrument’s traditional sound into something new, beautiful and exciting.
In his youth as a classical pianist, Hooper-Williams was a prizewinner at the International Shostakovich Piano Competition. Upon leaving that rarified world he toured with several bands, performing from SXSW and CMJ festivals to London’s Cafe Oto, and collaborated with multi-Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird. He has performed works by Rzewski and Corigliano, including city-level premieres. He briefly stepped into the tech industry to help develop the app Shazam, after which he returned to music, now composing his own works.