Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption has had rather a tangled history. During 2013, I was working on an orchestral piece inspired by Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus – a gloriously eccentric encyclopaedia of imaginary animals, landscapes, buildings, fauna and inventions. I had heard a first draft of this orchestral piece performed, and wasn’t satisfied with it – the first four minutes in particular. While thinking about how to turn this draft into a finished piece, I attended the composers course at Aldeburgh, and used my time there to re-work material from those opening minutes, giving it a new profile and shape (but for 15 instruments rather than 80).
This re-thinking of the material then got incorporated back into the orchestral piece, making Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption a sort of reverse-engineered prequel to the larger piece. The piece’s title comes from one of Luigi Serafini’s inventions from the Codex Seraphinianus – in the chapter on machines, Serafini displays a cloud fitted with wheels and helicopter blades that shoots rainbows out of colourful gun turrets at its rear, forming rainbows wherever it flies.
Instrumentation:
15 instruments: 1(=picc).1.1(=bcl).1 – 1.1.1.0 – perc(1): tam-t/2 tpl.bl/vib/xyl – pno – harp – strings (1.1.1.1.1)
Duration:
5 mins
Commission:
Written on the Britten Pears Contemporary Composition course
Performances:
14 July 2022
London Sinfonietta Academy, Geoffrey Paterson (cond.)
Grand Junction, London, UK
26 September 2020
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, John Storgårds (cond.)
BBC MediaCity, Salford, UK
17 November 2018
Junior Trinity Laban Composers Ensemble, Darren Bloom (cond.)
LSO St Luke’s, London, UK
21 June 2014
Britten-Pears Contemporary Ensemble, Gregory Charette (cond.)
Britten Studio, Snape Maltings, UK
13 July 2013
Britten-Pears Contemporary Ensemble, Gregory Charette (cond.)
Britten Studio, Snape Maltings, UK
World premiere