Donald Bousted is a composer, sound and installation artist, film maker and guitarist. His most recent work focuses on combining elements of all these interests. Typically, the work completed in the last 2-3 years has sought to integrate elements of film, performance and live art plus multi-sourced (up to eight-part) electro-acoustic elements transmitted from varied ‘qualities’ of source (from ‘high’ quality PA to ‘low’ quality exciter-speakers). A number of works, including the installation with Gary O’Connor broader than broadway and the mixed media pieces in your dreams; touch and the black hole utilise innovative, ‘home-made’ speakers made by attaching exciters to musical instruments, glass, floorboards and walls. This tranch of work has been sponsored by the pioneering British company NXT. The work touch (2005) specifically uses these different sources to give an expanded sense of virtuosity by attaching exciters to live instruments. Our perception of virtuosity is challenged as we hear sounds sourced on those instruments reintegrated within live-performed sounds.

Donald is a director and founder of Microtonal Projects Ltd, artistic director of UK MicroFest and curator of the mixed media platform Wild Dog Inc.. He in an occasional performer of his own work for quarter-tone guitar.

His music/sound art has been performed throughout the UK, in America, Germany, Switzerland, France, Czechoslovakia and Croatia and broadcast in the UK, America, the Netherlands, Sweden and France. His films have been screened in London, USA, Chile, Palestine and Russia and have been webcast and broadcast on HypTV (Sky TV).

Donald’s music for recorder is published by Moeck Verlag in Germany, Orpheus Music in Australia and Questions de Tempéraments in France.

CD recordings include: A Journey Among Travellers (Kathryn Bennetts and Peter Bowman); A Woldgate Requiem (Kevin Bowyer); Tears (Tubalaté); The Rhythm-Spring (Summerhayes and Brown) and the electro-acoustic piece Never Liked Water. His widely-screened 1 minute film The Birds is available on a limited edition DVD published by Host Artist’s Group. A major, retrospective double CD/DVD of his work will be released in the Autumn 2007 called 'The End of the Beginning'.

Donald has worked closely with a number of high-profile performers on specific projects: Stephen Altoft (trumpet); duo Contour (trumpet and percussion duo); Kathryn Bennetts, Peter Bowman and Rachel Barnes (recorders); Kevin Bowyer (organ and harpsichord); John Powell (euphonium) and Philippe Renard (Renard/Bolton Electro-Acoustic Recorder Project). He has also collaborated with the film maker Robert Pennant Jones, artists Gary O'Connor and Anne Robinson and live artist Janina Moninska (see www.janinamoninska.com).

Donald’s work as an artist in the areas of film, sound and installation have resulted in gallery showings at: 291, Cafe Projects, Lounge, and seven seven contemporary art (all London) and Al Kahf Art Gallery, Palestine. Film screenings have included: the 4th Hull International Short Film Festival; Greenwich Picture House; Loop, Barcelona; the Falmouth Film Festival; the SuperShorts Film Festival; Biennale of Video & New Media Santiago, Chile; Videologia Festival Volgograd, Russia; Regina Gouger Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburg/USA and le festival international du premier film, Annonay, France.

Donald studied composition with Philip Cannon at the Royal College of Music, the late Oliver Hunt (privately) and Margaret Lucy Wilkins at the University of Huddersfield. He won the Cobbett Prize for Composition at the RCM in 1981. He was awarded a PhD in musical composition from the University of Huddersfield in 2002. He is a co-author of The Quarter-Tone Recorder Manual (Moeck, 1998) and co-founder and former Artistic Director of Ensemble QTR. Notable performance venues include: the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; Bangor New Music Festival; St. John's Smith Square; the Berkeley Music Festival, California, USA; Musicora 97, Paris; The Purcell Room, London and the Teylers Museum, Holland.

Donald has written widely on the subjects of composition, microtonality and tuning and has presented seminars at many UK universities and abroad. He was the only British delegate at the first academic conference on microtonality in the USA at Claremont Colleges, California in 2001 where he presented a paper on microtonality and the recorder and, in 2002, he addressed the London Sinfonietta's 'State of the Nation' conference at the South Bank Centre, London. He has written for Classical Guitar and The Recorder Magazine and, in 2003, his article 'An Empirical Study of Quarter-Tone Intonation' was published in both the Huygens-Fokker Yearbook and Contemporary Music Review. He has given regular lectures with the trumpeter Stephen Altoft with whom he has collaborated on a microtonal trumpet project (see www.microtonaltrumpet.com).

As well as writing music, Donald has had a varied career as guitarist, conductor and teacher. He studied the guitar with Antonio Albanes and conducting with Harry Newsome at the Guildhall School of Music and trained to be a teacher at Durham University. Between 1993-2001 he was a lecturer in Composition at the University of Huddersfield and from September 2001 to June 2002 he was the first appointed Composer-in-Residence at the Centre for New Musical Instruments at the London Guildhall University (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). For the past 2 years he has been a part-time lecturer in music technology at Kingston University. Donald has also written for BBC TV, film, video and theatre. He is currently freelancing, based in London.