Peter de Moncey-Conegliano is a composer of electroacoustic music, based in Scotland.

Born in Southampton in 1948. His parents lived for a short time in Troon after the war  before returning to Southampton. At primary school he started writing poetry, played recorder and at 9 composed his first piece, ‘Ocean voyage concerto’ for treble and 2 descant recorders(now lost).

After a few disastrous piano lessons he taught himself. At grammar school he had clarinet lessons and sung chorus in Gilbert & Sullivan operas and Carmina Burana. Although he did music theory classes at school it was treated like a  branch of obscure mathematics. You never heard music but only told to follow rules. But luckily the school had a record library and it was through this he became influenced by the music of Prokoviev etc. As well as hearing a life changing performance of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ at Southampton University.

At the same time like everyone in his generation influenced by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, he taught himself guitar and started writing songs. He sang in various folk clubs in Southampton but his ‘contemporary’ songs didn’t go down well with the traditionalists and purists. One song had 25 verses!

Having gained a scholarship to Oxford, instead of studying Philosophy Politics and Economics as he should have done, he spent most of his time listening to classical records and broadening his knowledge of classical music by reading the backs of LP covers. He also acted in two plays ‘The Visit’ at the Oxford Playhouse and ‘Agamemnon’ in the Delphi amphitheatre in Greece. He also spoke in the Oxford Union against the new Tory leader Edward Heath and was one of the first people to hear Jimi Hendrix live in December 1966. At the same time, Peter discovered the music of Ravi Shankar on record and the early electronic music of Berio and Stockhausen.

After university he subsidised his musical activities by working as an international linguist telephonist and inevitably leftwing trade union official in London(1976-83) and Irvine and Glasgow(1983-94). It was during these years that he worked on a series of leftwing operas beginning with ‘The Chartists’ as an antidote to the creeping Thatcherism of the era. It was in the mid 70s that he studied electronic music seriously with Michael Graubart at Morley College London using the VCS3 synthesiser for the first time and visiting Peter Zinoviev’s studio in Putney. And first met the composer Alan Bush through the communist party and Workers Music Association. He attended the WMA Summer Schools in 1988 and 1989 and wrote his first art songs for soprano and piano as well as performing a ‘folk song’ arrangement of a Chartist poem which would form the initial idea for his opera ‘The Chartists’.

Between 2000 and 2011 he had several of his electroacoustic pieces performed at Sonic Arts Network conferences and the Bourges festival in France. He met Delia Derbyshire at a demonstration of the Composers Desktop Project in 1990. 

In 2006, Jane Chapman performed his ‘Thesaurus 2’  piece for amplified harpsichord and tape in London. And in 2020 he did virtual collaborations with the  Berlin based Azerbaijani pianist Fidan Aghayeva-Edler and the Norwegian based British composer and performance artist, Alwynne Pritchard. Peter continues to experiment with different methods of composing using the flat keyboards EMS and Buchla synthesisers - as well as midi wind controllers and converting  theremin improvisations to midi data. Always on the look out for new sounds and new compositional methods. He has been based in Ayr since 1984.