2 sopranos, alto (or mezzo-soprano or countertenor), tenor, baritone, bass, prerecorded sounds.
Sets a translation of Goethe’s Mailied by Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon.
Contains two field recordings of a wind farm rotating generator in Bernau bei Berlin, recorded by Peter Cusack (2021).
First performance May 2023 at Milton Court, Guildhall, London.
Art: Unknown photographer, WT-Energiesystems Albertshof wind turbines, Bernau bei Berlin, c. 2020
First performed at Dai Hall, AME, Huddersfield, July 2022, as part of a piano residency. Second performance at Cafe Oto, London, April 2023.
2021
Suite
Sextet
Written for Explore Ensemble
Alto flute/piccolo, bass clarinet, piano/keyboard, violin, viola, cello, prerecorded audio.
Commissioned by Explore Ensemble and Wigmore Hall, first performed at Wigmore Hall, July 2022. Later performance September 2022 at the Festival of New, Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh.
Prerecorded sound contain three field recordings:
1. A pier being demolished at Terminal Island Detention Centre, Los Angeles, rec. Steven Rowell
2. School children singing the national anthem before class in Pokigron, Suriname, rec. Gerrit Kalsbeek
3. Fruit flies trapped in an empty wine bottle, rec. Patrick Tubin McGinley.
Art: Maria Sibylla Merian, ‘Pineapple and examples of five insects’, from Merian's Drawings of Surinam Insects (1701-5)
Waiting
Six multitracked violins
Written for Ilya Gringolts
5 prerecorded violins with 1 live violin;
2ch prerecorded sound,
containing layered field recordings by Peter Cusack
of a metal jetty in Lunenberg County, Nova Scotia
Casual or idle music, but with distinct political or ‘species’ disappointment. Music wishes to escape from human smallness, but also knows such a wish to be itself stupid, vain, and ultimately quite human.
Performed by Slagwerk den Haag: Pepe Garcia, Niels Meliefste, Gabriele Segantini & Frank Wienk
Art: abandoned(?) trumpeter swan nest, Yellowstone national park, 1977 (photographer unknown).
Violin, keyboard, perc (2 drums & objects), e. guitar (tuned in just intonation); 2ch prerecorded sound.
Oct-Dec.
c.18’, fp at City University, London, March 2018
by Mark Knoop, Tom Pauwels, Serge Vuille
& Kasia Ziminska.
Dedicated to Bryn Harrison, Amber Priestley,
Sergei Zagny, & Laurence Crane
Studio recording by Irine Røsnes, Colin Frank & myself
Alternate quintet version, for violin, two keyboards, perc (2 drums & objects), cello; 2ch prerecorded sound.
Performed by Apartment House at LCMF, Dec. 2018.
A set of differently-sized, differently-coloured homages. Rather than applying procedural or abstract approaches to source music, the piece attempts to ‘digestively’ capture the spirit of its four dedicatee composers, squeezing their musics through my own preoccupations and handedness.
Art (clockwise from top left): Joseph Albers, Study for Homage to the Square, 1967; Homage to the Square: SP–IV, 1967; Untitled (from Homage au Carré portfolio), 1965; Homage to the Square: Starting, 1968.
Three Heames Settings
Baritone and three instruments
Text by Ian Heames
Written for Loadbang
Baritone, flugelhorn (or tpt), tbn, b. cl
2ch prerecorded synth, triggered on cues.
Jul-Aug.
c.12’, fp at Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield, Nov. 2017
by Jeff Gavett, William Lang, Andy Kozar,
& Carlos Cordeiro.
Recording available on request
Settings of three of Ian Heames’ large collection of sonnets (Face Press, 2016). Ian’s texts capture a particular combination of lyric gentleness and anthropocene gloom. It is a lobotomised music, at once present and absent.
Art: from a fan wallpaper for the 2008 video game, Apocalypse Rising
Carrying
String quartet
Written for Quatuor Bozzini
Feb-Sept.
c.12’, fp at King’s College Chapel, Aberdeen,
Oct. 2017 by Isabelle Bozzini,
Stéphanie Bozzini, Alissa Cheung
& Clemens Merkel.
Recording is of premiere.
A preliminary version was performed at Jeunesses Musicales, Montreal, in April 2017.
Written as part of the Bozzinis’ Composers’ Kitchen project, and co-commissioned by Sound and Music.
Caught somewhere between lightness and mourning – lightness which is also fullness, inflation, that is, like the zeppellin, a becoming-lighter; upwardness, or a more general floating. Also melancholia: a knowledge of loss, fullness in gratitude, a fear of burning. Carrying in the sense of plenitude, breathing, pregnancy.
Broadcast live on Dutch NPO Radio 4 Avondconcert, video below:
This piece, combined with the last sections of Claribel (to which it is related) forms the soundtrack of a short film I made:
Art: Egon Schiele, Old brick house in Carinthia, 1913
For piano (dancing)
Piano solo
Written for Philip Thomas
June
c.11’, fp at Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield, Jan. 2018,
by Philip Thomas
Dedicated to Philip and Cassandra
Recording by Ben Smith, Durham, June 2021
Companion to For piano (singing)
‘For what is there in this life, that it should be so dear unto us? or that we should so much deplore the departure of a friend? The greatest pleasures are common society, to enjoy one another’s presence, feasting, hawking, hunting, brooks, woods, hills, music, dancing &c. All this is but vanity and loss of time, as I have sufficiently declared.’
– Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
May
c.11’, fp at Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh,
Jul. 2017, by Sarah Saviet
Supported by Aldeburgh Open Space Artists’ Residency
Recording Huddersfield, March 2019
Circulating music, confined to habit. Habit as self-similarity and self-resemblance; as personal character, that which is self-consciously known or reflected. Has echoes of change bellringing – where each individual pattern is individually named, but all are infinitely circulating and self-similar.
Art: Ben Nicholson, 1934-6 (painting – still life)
While we are both
Soprano + backing
Text by Caitlín Doherty
Written for Juliet Fraser
Versions for soprano & 2-channel prerecorded sound
or soprano & four keyboards
(3 midi kbds, box organ doubling celesta)
Nov-Jan.
15’, fp at Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield,
Feb. 2017, by Juliet Fraser
Fp of version with four kbds at Gaudeamus Muziekweek,
Sept. 2018, by Natascha Young and Insomnio Ensemble.
Doherty’s text, specially written for this project, is concerned with the limits of communicating with and knowing others. The possibilities – and impossibilities – of commitment to other persons; how others move away. Pain in waking and longing for sleep.
Utrecht performance by Natascha Young and Insomnio (kbds. Sabien Canton, Enric Monfort, Laura Sandee & Pascal Meyer), cond. Ulrich Pohl
Claribel
Violin with piano
Written for Aisha Orazbayeva & Joseph Houston
Sept-Oct.
20’, fp at Paul’s Hall, Huddersfield,
Jan. 2017, by Aisha Orazbayeva & Joseph Houston
A piece named for Charlotte Alington Barnard (‘Claribel’, 1830–69), English composer of hymns and ballads. Popular and successful, shortly before her death it emerged her father, the rector of Ruckland (Lincs.), had stolen much of her money.
Much of the piece is made up of me (during writing) attempting to remember one of Claribel’s tunes which I had looked at and subsequently half-forgotten. The piece also has, as a fulcrum, the contradiction between the violin’s contorted and virtuosic musicianship, and the pianist’s, all broad-shouldered and plainly laid-out.
Art: William Orpen, Night (no. 2), 1907
Two hundred pieces of music
Eight performers with objects
Written for The Set Ensemble
Nov-Dec.
200’/indet., fp at Hardwick Gallery, Cheltenham
Dec. 2016, by Sarah Hughes, Dominic Lash, David Stent, Patrick Farmer, Bruno Guastalla, Samuel Rodgers, Chris Cundy & myself
Eight performers with sounding objects, and a large supply of written or notated texts. Performers are in one of four states: a state of consonance, a state of dissonance, a state of reading, and a state of playing what has been read.
Art: abadoned classroom in Chernobyl
Ambling, waking
Orchestra
fp by BBC Scottish Symphony
cond. Ilan Volkov
2(II=a.fl)2(II=c.a.)2(II=b.cl)2.2121.timp(w/ picc.timp).perc(g.c., mar.).hp.86664
Mar-Apr.
14’, fp at City Halls, Glasgow
May 2017 at Tectonics Festival
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3
Ambling as wandering, but also a marking or exploration of boundaries, ambulo vs ambio, circulation and compass. Waking as both a transition from sleep into wakefulness, and a mourning of its departure. The natural harmonics as sources of something both childlike and melancholy (cf. the opening of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges). The melancholy of the septimal ‘blue note’.
Youtube video of premiere:
Art: Pissaro, Entrée du village de Voisins, 1872
Sentimental drifting music
Mixed quartet
Written for Trace Ensemble
Alto flute, acoustic guitar, mezzo-soprano & keyboard (or tape)
New version (2018) for alto flute, Bb clarinet, cello, keyboard & prerecorded vocals
Jan-Feb. (rev. Apr. 2018)
13’, fp at workshop, Huddersfield
Mar 2016 by Alba Bru, Peyee Chen & Diego Castro Magas
broadcast of 2018 version by Explore Ensemble
HCMF 2020, Nov. (BBC Maida Vale)
Tribute to Martin Arnold. Also this piece is arguably in sonata form – not that I realised this while writing.
Art: Julius Mössel, A baby orangutan surrounded by exotic birds, c.1950s
Your wits an E la
Two violins
Written for Mainly Two
Dec-Jan.
c.7’, fp at Listenpony
Mar 2016 by John Garner & Marie Schreer
One of the curiousities of the Guidonian hand is that the highest pitch of its compass – the E la (a tenth above middle C) – doesn’t have a finger segment of its own, and instead floats just above the middle finger. This piece is about that situation of always-already floating.
More music for the asleep
Ensemble and five singers
Written for Orkest de Ereprijs
Dec.
4’, fp at Apeldoorn,
Feb 2016 by Orkest de Ereprijs
Slightly rev. version performed at Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Sept 2016
A piece which tries to capture that uncannily light sleep one passes through just prior to waking. Sleep that is anticipatory (even anxious), in which you can hear your alarm go off before it actually does.
Art: Giorgio Conrad, Madre senza casa e figli dormono per strada, stereo card no. 209, 1865-70
For piano (singing)
Piano solo
Nov.
c.10’
Recorded Manchester, spring 2016
Ded. to Suki & Tony
First public performance by Gregor Forbes, Glasgow, June 2018
Oct.
7’, fp Phipp’s Hall, Huddersfield
by RHEA, Winfried Ritsch, and myself
Obviously a homage to Nancarrow, but does many things Nancarrow didn’t, or wouldn’t. Actually less of a homage than a fan letter. The jumping performer accompanies the piano as a form of sympathy for non-human labour.
The Star-Spangled Banner
Arrangement of John Stafford-Smith
Feb.
Arr. for string quartet Feb 2017
1.5’, fp 840, 6 May 2017, St James’, Islington
by the Manon Quartet
Arranged when writing Trio ‘O Jean Armour’, rearranged for quartet two years later.
Art: Jasper Johns, Flags, 1970
Trio ‘O Jean Armour’
Piano trio
Feb.
c.12’, fp 840, 14 March 2015, St James’, Islington
by the Ruben Zilberstein, Katherine Tinker & Zoe Saubat
‘We twa hae run about the braes . . . We twa hae paidl’d in the burn’ (Burns)
Response to the failure of the Scottish referendum in 2014. I think like a lot of English people I had wished for the Scots to depart the union and take us with them.
Art: portrait of Jean Armour (wife of Robert Burns)
2014
Of the immortality of the crab
Ensemble
Oct.
11’, recorded London autumn 2014
A piece about death.
(‘Thinking of the immortality of the crab’ is the idiom used in spanish to excuse idle daydreaming: that in fact one was contemplating important philosophical diversions instead of just sitting there.)
Art: Anonymous, the Judde Memorial, c.1560
Going in and coming back out again
Two pianists with teaspoons
Autumn
8’, recorded London autumn 2014
This piece is probably also about death.
Art: Orville & Wilbur Wright in 1910
2013
Organ piece
Autumn
c.16’, recorded Manchester spring 2016
The chorale at the end is entirely faux, and the rest of the piece isn’t based on it either. A homage to Tim Parkinson.
Art: Hendrick Goltzius, Icarus, from the Four Disgracers, 1588
2011
All and said carefully
Cello + 2ch prerecorded sounds
Autumn
8’, fp Oliver Coates, West Road, Cambridge
Art: photo by LD, 2006
Machines to speak and feel themselves thinking
Installation in two rooms
Autumn
150’ (4ch)/35’(2ch), fp Whipple Museum of Science, Cambridge
A collaboration with Oscar Dub. Partly inspired by the astronomical clock in the Whipple Museum, this 35 minute 2ch fixed electronics piece was installed in the upper room.
Art: photo by LD, 2006
2009
Oy
Six clarinets and almglocken
Apr.
5, fp Royal College of Music, by Aurora Orchestra (cond. Nicholas Collon)
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3
Exploded klezmer by way of Radulescu. Later on, I was told that there is in fact a village in the Bavarian alps called Oy, which even justifies the almglocken.
