Commissioned by Marian Consort for ‘Laurence Osborn Day’ at the Wigmore Hall. World première given by Marian Consort conducted by Rory McCleery at the Wigmore Hall on November 25th, 2023.
Spare Parts is a collaboration between myself and the poet Joseph Minden. It is about the passing of time, ruin, and preservation. Each movement in the collection is held together by a little bolt or screw borrowed from another piece of choral music.
The first movement, ‘(i) loop (after Weelkes)’, is a kind of burial rite. A single line from Thomas Weelkes’s eulogy ‘Death Hath Deprived Me’ is set to repeat in a continuous loop. On each repetition, elements are removed from text, allowing new meanings to be exposed. The bones of Weelkes’s music are preserved, decorated in my harmonic colours and vocal textures.
The second movement, ‘(ii) crook (after Machaut)’ is a bit like a late-medieval motet. Late-medieval motets are chimeras. Ours is part-human, part-goat, part-bell. The text relates to the experience Joe and I have had — on entirely unrelated and separate occasions — of stumbling across large flocks of belled-up goats in the Cevennes mountains. Here, we commemorate their bleats and clangs.
The final movement, ‘(iii) spring (after Dowland)’ contains a line from Dowland’s ‘His Golden Locks’. In Joe’s poem, each word from the line ’O time too swift! O swiftness never ceasing!’ appears embedded in a line cut from a different text. My music behaves as if on a spring, boinging back and forth between Dowland’s harmony and my own as the words from his song emerge and recede. Time, too, is audibly elastic in this movement.
Spare Parts
for Six Voices
2023
Commissioned by The New London Chamber Choir. First performance given by the New London Chamber Choir conducted by Matthew Hamilton at CLF Art Café, London on October 17th, 2019.
Juvenilia is about the codes and languages that children use. Much of it was inspired upon reading Peter and Iona Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren, a wonderful ethnographic study of playground games, chants, rituals and insults from British schools during the 1950s and ‘60s. In Juvenilia, these texts are combined with texts from my own (1990s) childhood, including the chants ‘Ip Dip Doo’ and ‘Nobody Likes Me’, the made-up languages Pig Latin and Uvaguv, computer cheat codes, and Pokémon trading cards.
Juvenilia
Songbook for Mixed Voices
2018-19
Chorus of Satellites
for Three Female Voices
2013
Written for Juice Vocal Ensemble, in collaboration with poet Joseph Minden, as part of Sound & Music's Portfolio Scheme. Recorded by James Weeks and EXAUDI with funds from the PRS for Music Foundation and The Bliss Trust.
Chorus of Satellites was initially inspired by beautiful passages from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos which describe the moons of Jupiter, their orbits and physical and chemical characteristics. I was struck by the fact that many of Jupiter’s moons are in fact named after the lovers of Jupiter in Classical Mythology. The stories of these nymphs and naiads are at turns violent, beautiful, and bizarre, and almost always involve some sort of physical transformation. Chorus of Satellites attempts to use sound as a means of constructing complex illustrations of the moons Io, Callisto and Ganymede and the stories of their corresponding characters in Classical Mythology. During the piece, sounds, phonemes, and fragments of text are flung between singers as they move through the performance space, combining sonic and verbal depictions of the moons themselves and the stories and transformations of their corresponding characters.