Selected Works

CHAMBER

Crow Forms for horn trio (2022)

This piece is a response to Ted Hughes’ poem Two Legends, which begins the collection From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970). The title, Crow Forms, has a double meaning, both representing the form of the poem through use of its metric qualities which generate much of the initial material, but also acting as a narrative device, with the piece depicting Crow’s coming into being, as indicated in the text.

Performance by Jake Parker (horn), Ida Tunkkari (violin), David Palmer (piano)

Vuurtorens for mixed quintet (2021)

This piece explores the tensions between manmade and natural phenomena through the metaphor of Schiermonnikoog’s two lighthouses. The North Tower (Noordertoren), no longer used as a lighthouse, has been repurposed for meteorological study. The South Tower (Zuidertoren), since the installation of a revolving light in the North Tower in 1910, has become partly abandoned over the 20th century, until 1992 when a radio antenna was installed - yet, there still is no prolonged human activity within. Visually, you can see signs of a kind of ‘reclaiming’ of the structure by nature - the algae and peeling white paint of the South Tower contrasts with the bright red and well-maintained North Tower. It is also notable that the South Tower has a monk statue on its roof - similarly, a call to the past and the island’s original inhabitants (from which Schiermonnikoog’s name is derived). Musical materials are derived from transcriptions of Schiermonnikoog’s natural features (e.g. rivers), and these shapes come to define the music of the second movement, which exhibits graphic notation - a kind of notational ‘reclamation’ to parallel the lighthouse metaphor.

This piece was commissioned by the Lonelinoise Collective for the International Chamber Music Festival Schiermonnikoog, with support from i-Portunus.

Folyò for violin and cimbalom (2020-2021)

This piece uses a portion of the River Danube, known as the Danube Bend, to generate its musical material. Through overlaying and tracing the river graphic onto the cimbalom board, as well as in a pitch/time graph, contrasting pitch sets are generated that provide both a structure to the piece, and a dialectic between violin and cimbalom. The final section of the piece utilises graphic notation in both parts building to a cacophonous, wild sound; aggressively denying the convoluted processes within the work, whilst also providing a statement on the notion of manmade interaction with natural elements.

The title of the piece, Folyò, is Hungarian for ‘river’.

This piece was written as part of Psappha’s ‘Composing for Violin and Cimbalom’ scheme, premiered by Benedict Holland (violin) and Tim Williams (cimbalom) and broadcast on 26th July.

Pixelating the River for string quartet (2020)

This work is a continuation of my research concerning the process of pixelation in music. It explores how graphical inputs can organise pitch using two parameters: retained pitches (what remains of set derived from the original image) and regenerated pitches (generated using the new image; see below). The piece uses graphical insertions in the score, using portions of the river map to create glissandi, to be freely interpreted by the performer over the allotted time. The music moves through the river, which is divided into four harmonic sections. Within each quarter, a process of pixelation via magnification occurs, which generates new derivations of the initial tone row. The initial row could be thought of as the ‘surface’ of the river, with each subsequent magnification going ‘deeper’, and thus less clear. These harmonic layers often exist simultaneously, and the ‘retained’ pitches (what is left of the original tone row after magnification) create a tension between these two representations on a local level. This tension can be manifested as a critique of natural and technological processes, forging an eco- crtical interpretation of the work.

The process of composition was layered. From June to August, I wrote solo pieces for each of the quartet instruments, entitled Vignettes of a Pixelated River, which derive their material from each quarter of the river (see image).

Complexes of material are shared across Vignettes, and these are used in the full quartet, informing textures and characterisation of instruments, e.g. the cello may have a more dominant role in ‘quarter 2’ material.

The quartet is played continuously, with no breaks in the structure. Whilst the graphical insertions act as transitions between different harmonic sections, it should not be thought of as different ‘movements’; a river exists and flows in a unidirectional unbroken motion.

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This piece was commissioned for the Kreutzer Quartet, kindly funded by the Humanities Cultural Project Fund at the University of Oxford. The premiere was broadcast by The Oxford research Centre in the Humanities on 21st May 2021, filmed at the Holywell Music Room.

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The river – I remember this like a picture – the river was the upper twist of a written question mark. I know now it takes many many years to write a river, a twist of water asking a question.

– Carl Sandburg, River Moons, 1920

Diving Birds for percussion and piano (2020)

This piece is a response to Erika Klien’s painting Diving Bird (1939). Whilst the flowing and smooth shapes of the painting seem to be the most prominent feature of the work, the bold contrasts of colour also leap out, creating a feeling of tension. The music of Diving Birds aims to represent the intertwining nature of the geometric shapes, whilst also providing individual characters to reflect these visual chromatic contrasts.

This piece was written for the Peter Reynolds Composition Studio as part of the Vale of Glamorgan Festival 2020, which was sadly cancelled. My huge thanks to George Barton and Siwan Rhys for collaborating on this piece remotely, as well as Robert Fokkens for his compositional advice in a workshop, and Caroline Tress for organising.

Performance by GBSR Duo, June 2020.

RGB for clarinet and piano (2019)

This piece uses the RGB (red, green, blue) colour analysis of Jackson Pollock’s Out of the Web as its fundamental generator of material. The piano consists of three inner movements, representing each colour (red, green, blue) each of which have their own 4–note cell derived from random numbers. The clarinet represents the ‘true’ colour i.e. the average of red, green, and blue, and exists in one movement. Its material is a combination of the three aforementioned 4–note cells to give a 12–tone aggregate. The harmonic rhythm, and resultant implied tempi, are derived from the movement of the colour graphs; the higher the readings, the ‘faster’ the harmonic rhythm. Levels of colour saturation are also linked to harmonic groups and determine whether sets are ordered or not, giving this piece a quasi–serial overarching process.

Performance by Thomas Carr (clarinet) and David Palmer (piano)

Out of the Web: Approximation for piano duet (2017) 

The aim of this piece is to approximate, or even translate, Jackson Pollock’s Out of the Web (1949) into music for piano duet. The painting can, in a tongue and cheek way, almost seem like a graphic score, when mapping time on the horizontal and pitch on the vertical. Somewhat ironically, the purpose of this piece is to apply the intricate and precise to the abstract, so as to best generate music which represents the ‘life’ of the painting, and the subtle relationship between form and material.

Pre-determined characteristics include rhythm, durations, and structure. With pitch and other factors approximated intuitively.  This piece marks my first interaction with spatial analogues in pre-compositional design, with my doctoral work now focused around this issue.

Performance by Karl Lutchmayer and David Palmer.

SOLO

Equivalence for solo piano (2023)

This work responds to the series of photographs taken by Alfred Stiglitz in the 1920s, entitled Equivalents. The Equivalents (initially titled ‘Music’) are a sequence of cloud photographs which represent a significant development of photography into the realm of abstraction: there is no horizon line, no orientation, merely the texture and colouration of the cloud. Commentaries on the Equivalents notes the importance and new importance of the photographic ‘cut’ (‘the effect of punching the image, we might say, out of the continuous fabric of the sky at large’ (Krauss 1979)), in achieving a destabilising effect within the viewer. In Equivalence, large dissonant chords (using the extremities of fingering) are subject to a ‘cut’, like in Stiglitz’s photographs, leaving a triad as a kind of resolution. The destabilising effect is felt on iterations of the linear material, increasingly disintegrating yet paradoxically becoming more deliberate. Totality is implied through the use of every major and minor triad throughout the piece, played in sequence at the end of the work (albeit in a randomised order from their initial presentation).

Performance by David Palmer, 6th June 2023, Milton Court Concert Hall, London

Concert of solo piano works, 21st March 2023, Reid Concert Hall, Edinburgh

Performance by David Palmer

Ennui(t) (00:20)

Conditional (06:00)

Disintegrated Bones (12:00)*

Melody for Elodie (18:55)*

Arrays (22:10)

*= premiere performance

Supported by The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh

Ennui(t) for piano (2022)

This piece uses a similar approach to another recent work, Crow Forms (2022), and should be seen as part of a series of pieces which derive material using Ted Hughes’ From the Life and Songs of the Crow. Ennui(t) uses Crow Frowns as its generator, and is an expression of both the emotion and feeling of ennui (boredom, listlessness, frustration) seen through the exploration of clusters in the piano, contrasting with more lyrical (yet febrile) linear material. This contrast alludes to the wordplay of the title, ennui / en nuit (at night), but these two images do often coincide in reality.

Performance by David Palmer at Milton Court Concert Hall, London.

Breath (息) for shō (2021)

The concept of this piece is an exploration of breathing, both literally and figuratively. The musical cells within this piece are derived from tracing the Kanji symbols for ‘breath’ (息), ‘inhale’ (吸), and ‘exhale’ (吐) onto the fingering chart for the shō. In this way, the performer is not only breathing (both inhaling and exhaling), but performing musical material that is derived from the same idea - albeit mediated through a linguistic system. This links to the idea of ‘oneness’ that with relation to performance philosophies with both the shō and sheng: all material in some way alludes to an idea arising from these key terms, and thus the human and instrument are in sync.

This piece was written as part of the inaugural SEED 2021 Virtual Composition Academy, and I am grateful to Chatori Shimizu and JunYi Chow for their help in creating this piece. This piece is referenced in Chatori’s ongoing research on contemporary Shō technique, and can be viewed in section 4-7: https://www.chatorishimizu.com/composingforsho

More info on the SEED 2021 Academy can be found here.

Performance by Remi Miura.

Vignettes of a Pixelated River: No. 3 for viola & No. 4 for violin (2020)

These pieces take the increasingly pixelated 3rd and 4th quarters of a map of the River Thames as a generator for musical material. Each piece centers on a glissando (continuous slide) which traces the shape of the river quarter, and this is replicated in the full quartet. Replication is a feature common to all four of these works and Pixelating the River, extending beyond these overtly ‘graphic’ gestures - other passages are transplanted into the quartet, heard as a kind of echo from their existence as solo pieces, now surrounded by the new context of the larger work (which has other musical processes at work, still related to pixelation). This creates a dialectic between two processes of pixelation, separated literally by musical time and ‘real’ time (the quartet was composed 2 months after these pieces). In general, this practice plays upon the larger idea of representation within pixelation, characterised typically by a narrative of obfuscation, to instead focus on how these four pieces come together to construct Pixelating the River itself. I encourage listeners to try and hear these echoes in the full quartet after listening to the solo pieces - what effects does this have on your listening experience? How does the referential nature between the two works inform your comprehension of the musical narrative?

Supported through the Humanities Cultural Programme Fund at Oxford University, performed by Peter Sheppard-Skærved,

Arrays for solo piano (2020-2021)

Arrays is a work that explores how a varyingly pixelated text can be used to create musical structure and materials. The piece exists in five movements, one for each line of the text, that explore different ways in which one may interpret the ‘pixel arrays’ that are generated through pixelation. Characteristics such as pulse, rhythm, and density are linked to the visual representation, with elements of randomness used to create macro-structures and pitch sets.

I. …in to the web...

II. I hear arrays:

III. Paths followed and forgotten, but

IV. Still sounding. Sounding (un)clear

V. Until nothings remain.

This work was awarded a Highly Commended mention in the RMA Tippett Medal.

DISSOLUTION for solo organ (2020)

DISSOLUTION is a musical exploration of the visual process of pixelization on a map of the River Thames. The pixel size of the original image, used in the first piece, is gradually increased over the course of the next 11. This is reflected in the pitch material of each piece, which uses an ‘averaging’ process, similar to that of pixelization.

The pixelated graphics determine many aspects of composition, and pieces become increasingly dependent upon them. By XII, there is a single pixel as an input, resulting in the relegation of certain sonic aspects to the organist to reflect the culmination of data–loss in the image.

The performer is encouraged to find the most creative approach to registration possible with their instrument, descriptive indications are given as prompts.

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This piece was written for, and is dedicated to, Daniel Mathieson whose insights in the early concept of this piece were invaluable.

Rust for bass trombone (2019)

This piece takes its inspiration from the idea of a machine becoming gradually destroyed by rust. The music exists in two alternating sections. The first represents the machine in operation, characterised by confident moto perpetuo writing with controlled changes in dynamics. The second section represents time passing, characterised by longer, more lyrical lines that flow freely and explore variants on the first section’s material. By the end of the piece, the rust on the machine becomes crippling, represented by the trombone becoming ‘stuck’ and utilising the player’s voice to produce the melody. When the machine tries to function, and the trombone moves from its ‘stuck’ position, it then starts to break, signified by the visceral sound of lip mulitphonics.

LARGE ENSEMBLE

Erasure for string orchestra with metallic percussion (2021)

Erasure is a work which responds to the tensions between natural and urban environments, primarily through an exploration of two musical generators: arborescences and pixelation. An arborescence, or tree-like structure, was constructed and is varyingly pixelated over the course of the piece, with rhythmic cells and melodic contouring determined through these representations. The behaviour of the ensemble is characterised by strings as representative of nature, and percussion as the city. The increasing influence of the metal percussion upon the strings enacts ruptures and divergences in behaviours (shifting ‘clouds’ of glissandi, pizzicato etc. to lyrical solo lines), acting as a disruptive force.

The use of graphical insertions alongside the determinate notations is intended to act as both a form of embodiment, as well as eco-critical commentary. The indeterminacy of these performative images allows both the arborescence shapes to ‘speak’ for themselves (subduing my own agency), but also allows their degradation to be heard through the insertion of pixelated versions. It also speaks to the role of the individual within the collective, something that is at the heart of this work’s conception as well as narratives of environmentalism.

There is no attempt to project a ‘dominant’ force, since this belies the issue of finding a solution. Nature and modernity must co-exist sustainably; Erasure is a commentary on the urgency of a need to find this balance.

CHORAL

LIVING SENSE DATUM for large choir (2022)

This piece aims to portray a surreal interpretation of the climate emergency, primarily through its text and notation, touching on themes of human/technological interaction and agency. The text was generated through using the words ‘environment’, ‘climate’, ‘endangered’ into an AI poetry writing application. The grammatical errors, and nonsensical imagery, highlight the fallibility of technology, and its attempt to recreate human action – paralleling to narratives on how technology is the solution to the crisis, whereby people absolve themselves of responsibility. The notation extensively utilises indeterminate elements. I want to focus on the idea of collective action and self-determination as fundamental to creating the music (i.e. the performer’s choices are integral to the result), as these are essential qualities in an ecological, or political context.

Overall, the piece could be seen as an expression of so-called ‘eco grief’, where people grieve the loss of ecological structures. For me, this work is a manifestation of a personal, ongoing, grief, having lost my mother to illness in 2020. This work is dedicated to her.

H(AI)KU for 8 voices (2022)

H(AI)KU is a four-movement work which sets three AI-generated haiku that used prompts relating to the environment, such as ‘dawn’, ‘earth’, ‘life’, along with emotions concerning the environment in a contemporary perspective, such as ‘anxious’, ‘peaceful’, ‘vibrant’. The resulting texts contain grammatical errors, but nonetheless invoke suggestive and impactful imagery that, as humans generally obeying rules of syntax and meaning, we would not have assembled ourselves. Musically, this piece explores the idea of ‘artificiality’, whereby words and meanings become increasingly dismantled and obscured: oscillating between more traditional approaches to word setting and texture, and more unstable formulations of text and sound.

Home is Where… for SATB and Children (2021)

Home is Where… is the result of a collaboration with Horizon Voices, as part of their inaugural Composer’s Award (2020). The work uses a text written by Helen Turner (b. 2011) which was selected as part of a youth poetry competition run by the choir. The piece uses Helen’s text to explore notions of Family as ‘home’, suggested in the harmony through a ‘home’ chord to which the music seems to always return. This piece forms the culmination of Horizon’s Home is Where… project: a series of YouTube videos aimed at engaging young people into choral singing.

In Arbore Corpus for mixed choir (2020-2021)

In Arbore Corpus sets one of the myths from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which depicts the transformation of Phaeton’s sisters into trees, using an excerpt from original Latin as well as an English translation by Joseph Addison from 1717.

The piece utilises arborescences, or tree–like shapes, as a musical generator in order to render this myth metaphorically in the music: graphical insertions denote a more out-of-control, free, character to the music, alongside calmer passages derived from graphing an arborescence in a pitch–time space (i.e. section II). Convergence and divergence are overarching themes in the music throughout, similarly echoing evolutionary and natural traits in the subject matter.

Excerpt from a workshop with the BBC Singers in September 2021.

Psalm 150 for SATB (2018)

When listening to other composers’ settings of Psalm 150, such as Ives and Britten, I was struck by the celebratory atmosphere that permeated entire pieces.

As a result, I wanted to explore the more solemn, spiritual side of the Psalm; focusing on giving thanks and praise to God. Whilst the middle section does erupt into a ‘joyous’ episode utilising instrumental effects, it is subdued by a return to the opening contemplative material. Musically exploring the contrasts of the psalm, I believe, enhances both the joyous and reverent sides to the experience.

This piece was included in LFCCM 2019, performed by the choir of St. Pancras Parish Church, directed by Christopher Batchelor (recording below).

Worcester Service (Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis) for upper voices and organ (2017)

Worcester Service was recorded by Worcester College Chapel Choir at Exeter College Chapel, Oxford, conducted by Thomas Allery, and is available on the Herald label (HAVPCD 408).

VOCAL

Message without a Code for voice, flute, and electronics (2023)

Message without a Code explores the idea of the photograph in terms of sound, representation, and meaning. It is composed of three movements, with the first and third having an electronic tape part. The electronic part is entirely comprised of photographs turned into sound (sonified) using an application which converts photographs into spectrographs. In this sense, the idea of representation through photography is abstracted, reverting the medium to its beginnings as a light-capturing device; the sonification process is indeed analogous to treatment of negatives with various chemical in the development process. The first movement uses maps and satellite images of Edinburgh to sound a process of geographic expansion and development, with the final movement contrasting an historic photograph of Holyrood Palace and Arthur’s Seat by Archibald Burns (c. 1858) with interruptions from contemporary protest photography (since 2020) as well as AI-generated images: a disjuncture between the natural, human, and technological realms, and their interconnected agency.

The central movement, and the work title, refers to Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Photographic Message’. This work dispenses with the tape part, and instead explores the idea of photograph through ongoing debates of the medium as an ‘automatic’ art form.

All Dead Paper for soprano and viola (2020)

All Dead Paper focuses on the musical potential of pixelating text, affecting the visual layout as well as the text’s meaning. The cover illustration shows variations of pixelation on the titular phrase, as well as a line showing the path taken through the array. These pixelated images were analysed and musical details (particularly texture and rhythm) were generated. The metaphor of pixelation is implied through the increasingly nonsensical text in the vocal part, which then begins to semantically deteriorate following a rupture at b. 20.

The text is from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806-1861) Sonnets from the Portuguese (1846). These sonnets have a deliberately misleading title in order to mask their intimate nature (they are not translations of Portuguese originals, as one would assume), and this seemed appropriate for a musical exploration of a visual process which causes obfuscation. Similarly, the phrase ‘all dead paper’, taken from the opening of the 28th sonnet, particularly appealed to me for the tension between technology and modernity/antiquity, as well as the fact that one of the causes of visual display errors are ‘dead pixels’.

This piece was written for Sarah Dacey (soprano) and Stephen Upshaw (viola) as part of the Nonclassical Academy 2020.

OTHER

The Weedist for electronics and narrator (2018)

Collaborating again with Queenie Li, The Weedist was created for the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday event, which was themed around the idea of witchcraft and magic to coincide with their Spellbound exhibit.

The piece uses recorded samples of Gamelan instruments and manipulates them to create an other-worldly atmosphere to match Li’s film and the text.

The full piece can be viewed here.