Category Archives: Composition

BLAST

At last year’s Cohan Collective Dance Residency I worked with choreographer Joshua Ben-Tovim and composer Hollie Harding on a new work Enemy of the Stars. A BBC New Creatives film, BLAST, directed by Roseanna Anderson and Josh (http://impermanence.co.uk/), emerged from this collaboration. The film was inspired by the Vorticist journal – BLAST – which was edited by Wyndham Lewis. The journal included short stories, numerous illustrations, poems and a manifesto signed by 11 artists including Ezra Pound and Gaudier Brzeska. Hollie and I worked together to create the music for the film from musical materials we developed last summer.

The film evokes the pulsing energy of early modernist Britain with its experiments in form and desire to manifest a utopian future. We sit alongside a female audience and follow an artist, two dancers and two lovers, with the heavy shadow of retrospect, knowing the carnage and decimation that was to follow this remarkable period of productivity.

The Driver

Terrific workshop last week with Riot Ensemble for my collaboration with poet Luke Wright. Exciting to be putting stuff together and making plans for a tour, hopefully in 2021.

Here’s a taster of the poetry:

Is this how it ends for all of us?
love born at festivals
in chemicals and poetry
love that lived beyond our bodies
love that conquered motorways and calendars
love that conquered half of England
is this how it ends?

from The Driver, by Luke Wright

More info and some taster audio on the Riot Ensemble website: http://riotensemble.com/the-driver/


PLAYLIST @ Baffi

I’m excited to have a new piece, Drip Feed, premiered by the amazing harpsichordist Jane Chapman on 11 June at Baffi Portswood as part of PLAYLIST. I will also be playing piano in the PLAYLIST Collective, in which we will perform tracks from Miles Davis’ seminal album ‘Birth of the Cool’.

‘Changing Up +’ Video

Video now online of the premiere of my Changing Up + for solo percussionist and large ensemble from the recent SHIFTS project at Turner Sims. Joley Cragg totally nailed the percussion as did the HARTLEY Loop Orchestra, which features students and staff from the University of Southampton Music Department.

‘Pythagoras’ Toolkit’

I’m really delighted that Pythagoras’ Toolkit, led by Ensemble Paramirabo (Montreal) and involving me as co-creator, composer and conductor, has been awarded funding from the Canadian Council for the Arts.

In Pythagoras’ Toolkit Rachel Warr (co-creator/director, Dotted Line Theatre) and I will bring to life, through puppetry and live music, a modern-day Pythagoras who will explore sound, space (conceptual/sound/realworld), rhythm, harmony and dissonance (order and chaos), instrument making/design, dance, musical textures and ways of constructing music.

The production, currently planning for a tour in 2021, will feature musicians from Ensemble Paramirabo (Canada), Workers Union Ensemble (UK) and two musically literate puppeteers working with a specially created Pythagoras puppet.

Rachel and I are concocting ideas already… more soon!

Elizabeth Kenny CD and tour

Superstar theorbo player Liz Kenny has recorded my Extending from the inside (2014) for her new solo CD coming out on Linn Records this summer. She is doing a prestige tour to promote the disc taking in Cleveland Institute of Music, Aldeburgh Festival, Oxford Festival of the Arts and the Wigmore Hall.