An update about some recent education work I've been doing – alongside violinist Sarah Hill, I organised a two-day composition course for 9-14 year olds, held at Pembroke House in South London. The course was inspired by George Crumb's piece Eleven Echoes of Autumn, extracts of which we performed during the course with flautist Jenny Dyson, pianist Dasol Lee and...
This Friday, the Bangor New Music Festival will play host to the premiere of a new piece of mine for chamber orchestra, entitled Antic Rounds. The piece will be performed by the Orchestra of the Swan, conducted by their director David Curtis, in a concert also featuring a premiere by festival director Guto Puw and pieces by Robert Saxton, Huw...
I have been selected for the 'Opera Creation' workshops at the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence this summer. The workshops are being run by playwright Martin Crimp, with contributions from his operatic collaborator (and my composition teacher) George Benjamin. I will take part in seminars and workshops alongside other young composers, librettists and directors, and will also attend festival operas and concerts. The...
I have been commissioned, with funds from the William Alwyn Foundation, to write a piece for the Britten Sinfonia for their 2014/15 season. The piece, scored for string orchestra, will be premiered in March 2015 in concerts at Cambridge's West Road Concert Hall, Norwich's Theatre Royal, and the Barbican's Milton Court Concert Hall in London. All concerts will feature Thomas...
My piece Codex (Homage to Serafini), performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Garry Walker, was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 this Saturday the 11th of January. The programme is the BBC's weekly contemporary music programme Hear and Now, and also features music by Ben Oliver, Aaron Holloway-Nahum and Robin Holloway, as well as interviews with all of us...
For the past year, I have been in residence with the BBC Symphony Orchestra as part of the Embedded scheme run by Sound and Music, and on Thursday 14 November my new 12-minute piece for the orchestra, Codex (Homage to Serafini), will receive its premiere. Garry Walker will conduct my piece at BBC's Maida Vale Studios, alongside new works written...
I have been commissioned by the Bangor New Music Festival to write a chamber orchestra piece for the Orchestra of the Swan conducted by their director David Curtis. The piece will celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, and will be performed during the festival on 14 March 2014 alongside a new violin concerto by Guto Puw and pieces by...
For the past 10 days I've been in Aldeburgh at the Contemporary Composition course, working with Oliver Knussen, Colin Matthews and Michael Gandolfi. I've been writing a short piece for 15 players entitled 'Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption', after one of the inventions in Luigi Serafini's Codex Seraphinianus (the image to the right is, of course, the contraption in question). Tomorrow it'll be...
Ahead of the premiere of Four Perpetual Motions by members of the Philharmonia Orchestra a week on Thursday, I have written a blog post for the Royal Philharmonic Society, who commissioned the work. It's on flippancy and music – and how I attempted to write Four Perpetual Motions with some of that tone. …Flippancy, especially as expressed in art, is a kind of...