Commissioned by Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Cheltenham Festival, and Kings Place, London. World première tour given by 12 Ensemble and GBSR Duo, May - July 2023.
TOMB! is one continuous movement - a tombeau - lasting twenty minutes. It is, like any tombeau, written with great admiration and affection for older music. But it’s also a piece that recognises and questions the morbid obsessions of heritage culture.
The tombeau is a strange custom, whereby a living artist honours a dead one by impersonating their voice. In her essay ‘Outside the Tomb’, Carolyn Abbate recasts the tombeau as a mechanism that reanimates the voice of the dead artist from within, as if by magic. This beautiful and grotesque idea - of homage becoming necromancy - was the starting point for TOMB!
TOMB! contains many lifeless forms from musical history - fugues, gigues, passacaglias, and things like that. All of these objects appear in a state of decomposition. Some are jolted into life, like frogs at the end of battery cables; others are worn like glove puppets; others rise slowly to their feet and lurch around, as if under a spell. Occasionally, things appear in their pure, calcified form: frozen, like fossils, at the moment of expiry.
TOMB!
for Piano, Percussion and Strings
2022
Commissioned by The Riot Ensemble with funds from Arts Council England: Grants for the Arts, and the PRSF Open Fund. World premiere given by soloist Sarah Dacey and The Riot Ensemble conducted by Aaron Holloway-Nahum, St Pauls Hall, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 24th November 2017.
“Writing of powerful resonance and fluency. Ctrl suggests a prodigious dramatic talent.”
"The most assured piece was Laurence Osborn’s Ctrl, which showed a confident hand with larger forces and a talent for synthesising different kinds of harmony and stylistic reference points in a manner reminiscent to Thomas Adès or Maxwell Davies."
Stephen Chase, Tempo
“I’m sure I can’t have been the only person in the hall to feel as though Osborn had personally punched me in the chest… Ctrl was clearly something special and possibly – time will tell – important.”
Ctrl is a three movement song-cycle about toxic masculinity written from the fragmented perspective of a male character and sung by a female singer. The piece examines the cycles of physical and psychological violence transferred between men, and the resulting damage. It also deals with themes of power, entitlement, fear, loneliness, and suicide. The vocal part uses autotune. In my opinion, autotune is the perfect analog for a hyper-masculine character because it gives the human voice the illusion of invulnerability by masking the vulnerabilities and imperfections that make it human. The three movements of Ctrl are called ‘No Heart’, ‘Body’, and ‘No Head’.
Ctrl
for Amplified Soprano
and 13 Players
2017
Black Snow Falls
for 23 Solo Strings
2017
Commissioned by Outcry Ensemble with funds from the RVW Trust. World premières given by The Outcry Ensemble cond. James Henshaw at St John’s Notting Hill, 27th April 2017, and Temple Church, 9th May 2017.
Black Snow Falls takes its name from one of the final lines of Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis, which was completed in 1999 and premiered posthumously in 2000. 4.48 Psychosis is a first person account of the clinical depression that Kane was suffering from while writing it. Kane committed suicide shortly after finishing the play, and subsequently, the play has been interpreted as a long-form suicide note - especially because there are no allocated characters, and no discernible plot.
The three words "black snow falls", to my mind, are an extraordinarily vivid metaphor for suicidal depression. The surreal image of "black snow", brings into focus, for me, ideas of destruction and/or decay particularly because of the image's likeness to ash or soot. But the line's reference to meteorology also suggests a terrifying powerlessness from the perspective of the author - the weather is, like illnesses of the mind and body, something that we are unable to control.
If there is one idea binding my piece together, it is the idea of powerlessness. At the opening of the piece, you will hear fragments of stunted material - written to sound like yelps or cries - which attempt to coalesce into a whole before falling apart again. These fragments of material determine virtually all of the music of the piece - they are warped, distorted, placed in sequence, but never manage to develop in a meaningful way. At the end of the piece, they are overwhelmed and finally suffocated by a sequence of chords on lower strings.
Lias
for Ten Players
2015
Commissioned by LSO Soundhub. World première performance given by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Cohen, at LSO St Luke's April 17th, 2015.
The Blue Lias is a geologic formation found on the coastline of Southern England, which consists of layers of shale and limestone dating back to the Triassic and Jurassic periods. It is particularly rich in fossilized flora and fauna.
Lias is inspired by my experiences looking for fossils in the Blue Lias cliffs of Lyme Regis in the Summer of 2014, and, in particular, a walk that I took along The Undercliff pathway between Lyme Regis and Axmouth during my stay there. The pathway is a tunnel of trees and enormous plants, so densely enmeshed with one another that it is almost impossible to see the sky. Everywhere you look, you can see countless tendrils of vegetation coiling around and over one another, before spiraling up towards the light. The environment has a dreamlike or hallucinatory feel about it, but the roughness of the terrain, the sticky humidity, and the pungent smell of vegetation act as a constant reminder that this is an environment of pure, unabated “living”, for want of a better word. I was moved by the thought that the roots of this tangle of vegetation lay in rocks themselves composed of a jungle of similar organic matter dating from over 150 million years ago.
Change Ringing
for Nine Solo Strings and Percussion
2013-2014
Collaboration with artist Peter Shenai. Commissioned by LSO Soundhub. World première given by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Darren Bloom, at LSO St Luke's April 17th, 2014. Repeat performances given at Green Man Festival, 15th and 16th August 2014 and at The Annexe, LimeWharf, 4th December 2014.
Change Ringing takes its pitch material from the spectral analyses of six beautiful bronze bells, which have been cast by my collaborator, Peter Shenai. These bells mathematically correspond to the “bell-curve” representations of mean temperatures at 17 year periods over the last century. Struck in order, they voice incremental changes in pitch and timbre, thereby expressing sonically the phenomenon commonly known as “global warming”.
Each of the six sections of Change Ringing corresponds to one of these bells. All pitch material is derived from the bells’ inharmonic spectra which, in their original form, signal the beginning of each section. The remainder of the pitch material in each section derives from the sum and difference tones of the corresponding spectrum, the sum and difference tones of the resultant frequencies, and so on.
The sections are organized thus: Bell 2, Bell 3, Bell 4, Bell 5, Bell 6, Bell 1. The final section therefore pulls the narrative back to a time before the the rapid increase in global temperature begun at Bell 2. Between Bell 5 and Bell 6, there is a solo for Bells 2, 3, 4, and 5.
