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...
I have been commissioned by the Bangor New Music Festival to write a chamber orchestra piece for the Orchestra of the Swan conducted by their director David Curtis. The piece will celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and will be performed during the festival on 14 March 2014 alongside a new violin concerto by Guto Puw and pieces by...
For the past 10 days I've been in Aldeburgh at the Contemporary Composition course, working with Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews and Michael Gandolfi. I've been writing a short piece for 15 players entitled 'Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption', after one of the inventions in Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus (the image to the right is, of course, the contraption in question). Tomorrow it'll be...
Ahead of the premiere of Four Perpetual Motions by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra a week on Thursday, I have written a blog post for the Royal Philharmonic Society, who commissioned the work. It's on flippancy and music – and how I attempted to write Four Perpetual Motions with some of that tone. …Flippancy, especially as expressed in art, is a kind of...
The ever-wonderful Trio Atem will perform a selection from my 'Seven Face Pictures' at the Nip & Tipple bar in Manchester this Sunday the 2nd June. Scored for mezzo-soprano, flute and cello, the piece is a song cycle on the poetry of Caroline Bird, and has been performed by Trio Atem several times since they premiered it in 2011. The...
The April edition of the Tempo journal, published by Cambridge Journals, contains an article by me entitled 'Pierre Boulez's Sur Incises: Refraction, Crystallisation and the Absent Idea(l)'. It's an analytical study exploring how Boulez's extraordinary piece for three pianos, three harps and three percussionists relates to its solo piano predecessor Incises, and also to Boulez's late style in general. The...
An update on various bits of news – I had brilliant workshops of works-in-progress with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the Philharmonia on the 18th and 25th of March, and I've also got one more workshop with the BBC, on the 22nd April. It's such a joy and a luxury to try out material ahead of the premieres, and the eventual...
Three pieces of mine are being workshopped in the coming weeks – a smallish one in Wales on Thursday, a rather large one in London on Monday, and a medium one in London on the 25th. Monday the 18th brings my first workshop with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of my Sound and Music Embedded residency. My piece, under the...
Enmîmés sont les gougebosqueux, premiered earlier this year by Gemini, will receive its second performance on the 9th December at the Great Hall at King's College London. It's being played by Area21, a new ensemble directed by Mischa Tangian, a fellow student of George Benjamin at King's. My piece will be played alongside pieces by Mischa himself, Stravinsky, Ligeti, Villa-Lobos...