Identifying points of reference in Andrew Toovey's work can present quite a challenge. Not only are his musical sympathies unusually diverse and deliberately unaligned to the readymade categories of our recent past (minimalism, neo-Romanticism, new complexity), but the fundamental stylistic ‘gesture’ can as readily be compared to the visual arts as to any music – to the work of Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg or Stanley Hayter.