Commissioned by The Wigmore Hall for ‘Laurence Osborn Day’ 2023. World première given by Solem Quartet at The Wigmore Hall on 25th November 2023.

Lakes, Mists, Bats, Daggers, and Fountains. This gorgeous parade of images comes from a disparaging definition of Romanticism in the nineteenth-century Parisian newspaper, Le Corsaire, as quoted in David Cairns’s biography of Berlioz. Romanticism is  defined as ‘greasy hair growing over the coat-collar’, ‘sighing at least three times a minute’, and ‘dreaming of lakes, mists, bats, daggers, and fountains’. When I read the quotation, that final parade of images reached out and poked me. The images had conspired to rebel against their own glibness and communicate something vivid and fantastical in spite of the intentions of their author.

Commissioned by Manchester Collective. World première tour given by Mahan Esfahani and Manchester Collective at Lakeside Arts Nottingham, Leeds Town Hall, and Norfolk and Norwich Festival, May 2021

Coin Op Automata (2021) begins as an expansion of the harpsichord’s inner mechanism, wires crawling out of the belly of the instrument to lasso the string players, leading them in a clockwork dance. The second movement opens with a clanking aria heard in low harpsichord and high violin, complete with arabesques borrowed from both baroque and auto-tuned RnB singing. This chimerical voice — part human, part machine, part bird — is just one of many mechanical vignettes that the piece is built from. Coin Op Automata is inspired by a museum my wife used to visit as a child, filled with coin-operated machines. The structure of the piece is itself an arcade: a series of little musical automata that share space and parts with one another.

Commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia. First performances given by soloist Mahan Esfahani and the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Laurence Osborn on 1st October 2019 (West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge), 2nd October 2019 (Wigmore Hall, London) and 4th October 2019 (St Andrews Hall, Norwich).

An automaton is a mechanical object designed to play the role of a human being. Unlike the robot or the computer, both of which attempt as best they can to disguise themselves as humans, an automaton keeps its artificiality on show. I've always found something endearing in this naive, mechanical representation of humanity. The sound of the harpsichord is perceptively inseparable from the mechanical means of its production: the instrument sounds like a machine because you can literally hear its mechanism in action. But it is also an instrument that enables an extraordinary degree of sensitivity, expression, and personality on behalf of the performer. When I hear the harpsichord, I feel like I am hearing a musical automaton: a sound that blurs the boundaries between the mechanical and the human.

The music in Automaton is sometimes human, sometimes mechanical, and sometimes both.

Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society for Music in the Round Festival 2018 (RPS Prize Commission). First performances given by Ensemble 360 at Emmanuel Church, Barnsley, 30th November 2018, and Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, 1st December 2018.

Me and 4 Ponys is about drawings by children. I love drawings by children because they are completely unconcerned with consequence or correction. The first mark on paper is always part of the final piece. Each line is fearlessly drawn. Form, scale, and subject change constantly throughout the creative process, at the whim and intuition of the artist. The results are always endearing and grotesque in equal measure. Me and 4 Ponys wasn’t made in this way - I rewrote and scrapped a lot of music while writing it. But it musicalises aspects of children’s drawings - hard, wax-crayon-like textures, and big, unannounced gestures like handprints or blobs of paint. There’s a jig-like pulse that persists throughout the piece, which is why the title refers to ponies.