Commissioned by Smorgaschord Festival. World première given by Ben Goldscheider at Chapter House, Christ Church College, Oxford, 17th June 2023

The ‘Halali’ in the title of this piece refers to a call that appears in numerous collections of hunting calls from seventeeth-century France. ‘Halali’ is called as the exhausted animal is surrounded and killed by huntsmen with knives. The reality of the hunt — ritualised slaughter with the veneer of nobility — is important to this piece. But so are the immediate, embodied aspects of horn-playing, the physical exertion that the music demands, and the progressive exhaustion wrtten into the music’s incrementally flattening pedal tones.

Commissioned by Zubin Kanga for the album Cyborg Pianist, released on NMC 29th September 2023. World première given by Zubin Kanga at Kings Place, 30th September 2023.

Counterfeits (Siminică) is a series of five small pieces, arranged in a chain, which together form an imperfect, partial rendering of ‘Afara e Ituneric’ as recorded by the great Romanian singer Dona Dumitru Siminică. Much of the material for the piano is freely composed around basic material from the recording. None of the voices recorded on the vocal patch for this piece belong to Siminică. 

Commissioned by City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to celebrate their centenary. World première given by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Clark Rundell at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 29th January 2023.

The Biggest Thing I’ve Ever Squashed takes its name from an interview with the artist Cornelia Parker. She’s talking about a sousaphone which she flattened with an industrial press in order to make her piece Perpetual Canon. Perpetual Canon is a mobile made from suspended flattened brass instruments which have been arranged in the round and backlit onto the walls of the space in silhouette.

The Biggest Thing I’ve Ever Squashed begins with six bars of a march, which are repeated and gradually ‘squashed’ in various ways, before being exploded into fragments and arranged into a sort of structural mobile. Music is heard both in its original and shadow forms. At the end, remaining fragments are re-arranged into a new march, which carries the piece to its conclusion. Like Cornelia Parker’s sousaphone, the six bars of orchestral march that open the piece are the biggest thing I’ve ever squashed.

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.

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 Zubin Kanga with funds from the RVW Trust. Preview performance of movements 1 and 2 given by Zubin Kanga at Nonclassical @ The Victoria, London on May 22nd, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. First complete performance given by Zubin Kanga at Kings Place, London on November 29th 2019. French première given by Zubin Kanga at Maison de la Radio France, Festival Présences, Paris, 14th February 2020.

Absorber is about outdated, ugly sounds. and the ways in which memories, both nostalgic and traumatic, enable them to acquire new associations and meanings. Listeners of my generation were surrounded by these sounds during childhood and adolescence. In spite of their crudeness, there is something haunting and beautiful about them.

Movement 1, ‘Homerton Hospital 050989’, uses a synthesised choir sound similar to the ones found in 1980s pop music, and surrounds it with a clunking ground bass and flurries of birdsong in the piano; Movement 2, ‘Solos’, is a solo for Rhodes Electric Piano which goes badly wrong; Movement 3, ‘Threes’, is a manic scherzo built entirely from parallel major triads, and uses the bright, synthesised piano chords heard in 1990s house music. Movement 4 ‘Gordon Hospital 101018’, sits apart from the other three movements, in that it is for piano only.

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.

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.

Commissioned by Filthy Lucre with funds from Arts Council England: Grants for the Arts. World premiere given by soloist Gwilym Bowen and keyboardists Joseph Havlat, Thomas Ang, and Ben Smith, cond. William Cole at Filthy Lucre: Lingua Ignota, Hackney Showroom, 24th February 2018.

ELITE is about the communal vocabularies constructed in so-called ‘high art’ cultural traditions, and their contribution to the annexation of these traditions. It is written both in disgust at the self-satisfied faux-grandiosity and opulence of the scene that we work in, and in recognition of the composer’s, performers’, and audiences’ complicity. ELITE includes three arias by Mozart, Purcell, and Monteverdi, whose texts and musical material have been mangled beyond recognition. All of the musical and textual vocabularies in this piece have been constructed from the dismembered parts of these arias.

Commissioned by Nonclassical with funds from the PRSF Open Fund. World premiere given by the Nonclassical Orchestra cond. Jessica Cottis at Nonclassical: Rise of the Machines #2, Village Underground, 18th March 2018.

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.” 

Helen Wallace, The Arts Desk

"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.”

Simon Cummings, 5:4

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’.