For 90 years, John Chowning has lived in constant motion. From his youth as a globetrotting music savant through a heyday of radical computing that revolutionised pop, the composer and programmer has taken scarcely a moment to buffer. And so it is when I video call his home in Palo Alto, California: he’s been tinkering with a musical composition, snuggled on a sofa in a hoodie. “I’m working all the time,” he says with an affable smile. “But I love my work, so it’s healthy.”
His assignment today is to resurrect Voices, a 2005 piece he will perform with his wife, Maureen, alongside a lecture at this week’s No Bounds festival in Sheffield. Chowning’s hearing and vision may be waning but, he says, “artists don’t retire. They create their art until they can’t.”
