Tension, a recording of miscellaneous works released on Mode Records. Skempton was the winner in the Chamber Scale Composition category at the Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards in 2005 for his string quartet Tendrils (2004). Works Skempton's style is characterised by a concentration on quality of sound and economy of means, absence of development in the conventional sense, and concentration on sonority. Many of his pieces are quite short, lasting no longer than one or two minutes. Although the compositional methods are clearly experimental, involving, for example, aleatory methods, there is a marked emphasis on the melody in many pieces. Some of his earlier piano works, such as Saltaire Melody (1977) and Trace (1980), have become favourites with the public. Formative influences on Skempton's music included the works of Erik Satie, John Cage and Morton Feldman. For example, A Humming Song (1967), an early piano piece composed before Skempton started lessons with Cardew, is a miniature with static, gentle sound. The harmonic structure consists of eight symmetrically arranged pitches, out of which six are selected for use in the piece. Chance procedures are then used to determine the order and number of occurrences of individual pitches. The pianist is asked to sustain certain pitches by humming. Another early piece, Drum No. 1 (1969), composed for the Scratch Orchestra, consists of just a few written instructions to the performers and is clearly inspired by similarly realised works by La Monte Young, whose music Cardew was enthusiastically propagating in the late 1960s. The score of May Pole (1971), a piece for orchestra, consists of a chance-determined sequence of chords. Each performer chooses a note from a chord, and chooses the moment when to play that note. The later the choice, the softer the dynamics. Skempton later called such pieces "landscapes" that "simply project the material as sound, without momentum." Other early works include two pieces for tape, a medium Skempton rarely used later: Indian Summer (1969) and Drum No. 3 (1971). The early 1970s saw a slow shift from static, abstract pieces to pieces with more clearly defined rhythmic and harmonic structures, although the methods and forms Skempton used remained unorthodox. For instance, in the series of Quavers piano pieces (1973–75) the music consists solely of repeated chords with no pauses between them. In addition to "landscapes" two other categories appeared, dubbed "melodies" and "chorales" by the composer. The "melodies" are single