Codex (Homage to Serafini) – 14th November

For the past year, I have been in residence with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of the Embedded scheme run by Sound and Music, and on Thursday 14 November my new 12-minute piece for the orchestra, Codex (Homage to Serafini), will receive its premiere. Garry Walker will conduct my piece at BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, alongside new works written by fellow Sound and Music Embeddees Ben Oliver and Aaron Holloway-Nahum and music by Emily Howard and Robin Holloway. It’s been a thrilling and illuminating experience working with the BBCSO and the finished score is immeasurably better thanks to the wonderful workshop time we had on earlier drafts. Tickets are free and can be booked at the BBC website, and if you can’t make it, the concert will be recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in the new year.

I’ll also be speaking about the piece and the process as well as playing some examples from the workshops on Resonance FM alongside Aaron and Ben two days before the concert. It’s part of the weekly LSO Soundhub Hour, where composers on the LSO’s flagship development programme discuss matters musical. We’ll be broadcasting live on the 12th November between 9.30 and 10.30pm, and the programme will also end up archived on Soundcloud.

Some other news – Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux has been awarded Second Prize in the Sun River Composition Prize, awarded by the Sichuan Conservatory of Music, China. The First Prize was awarded to Shou-Zhu Yang. Closer to home, the piece will also receive a repeat performance by Psappha in Manchester on the 7 March, after they performed it at the Bangor New Music Festival earlier this year. The concert is at the Cosmo Rodewald Hall, and also features Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Slide Stride, and a new commission by my old teacher Camden Reeves.