[6] Parkinson attended Bedford School[7] before studying at Worcester College, Oxford and privately in Dublin with Kevin Volans, and participating in the Ostrava Days 2001.
[11] Parkinson himself has described his compositional methods as follows:What I want beforehand for myself is a large and unforeseen diversity of pitches and intervals – randomness, patterns, shapes – and of course there are countless ways to generate pitches… I’m quite inclusive about what pitches or intervals are presented – I like consonance and dissonance – so sometimes a sequence of notes might be reminiscent of other music, and of course it might not be reminiscent of anything to me, but it might to others… Often I have used the page as a structural unit, like a movement or a panel, and allowed the players to choose their own order of pages for a performance.
This is Parkinson's first work explicitly conceived as an album and is titled after the 'Paese dei balocchi' (Land of Toys) in Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), translated in the 1940 Disney film adaptation as 'Pleasure Island'.
[16] Parkinson's second solo album Here Comes A Monster was released in May 2020 on Cafe Oto's Takuroku imprint, founded to distribute music made during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parkinson's opera, Time With People (2012–13) has been widely staged by various international companies, and received performances in London, Huddersfield, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oberlin, Ohio, New York (by Object Collection) and Brussels.