​On April 10th, I am putting on a gig at The Horse Hospital in London! I will be playing the Hyasynth, both solo and with violinist Amalia Young. This is the first performance of a duo project we have been working on since last year. It’s a collaboratively written piece that mainly drones and glistens, but sometimes surges and sinks. We don’t know what it’s called yet, but it’s been fun making it. Here’s a clip:

​We will be joined by my friend Laura Phillips, who I met at the British School at Rome. Laura works in expanded film, drawing noise and beauty from 16mm film strip. She is just a brilliant artistic mind, one that is always finding nice sounds in unexpected places. Kicking the evening off is a composer friend of mine, Lara Agar. Lara is working with mezzo-soprano Rosalie Warner on a new EP: we’ll hear the first fruits of this collaboration.
​
It's fun to put on a gig with a couple of good friends, and it would be lovely to see you there! Tickets here.

​You can tell I’ve been hard at work because I missed a whole newsletter, and so have to sum up two months of music making: As well as settling properly into my teaching role at Durham University, I had my Wigmore Hall debut with GBSR Duo and EXAUDI. It was such a pleasure to play with these amazing musicians, particularly in Alex Tay’s extravagant, intimate picture of a wealthy man falling apart, money & yes. 
​
I was so pleased to hear EXAUDI play Paroles Gelées, my piece for voices and electronics setting an excerpt of Rabelais. It’s a frozen, slidey bit of voice writing that draws on Palestrina, Josquin, and Linda Catlin Smith (who was also performed in this programme). I’ll have a recording of it available soon!

​Talking of recordings, I have also been in the studio with Sansara, a vocal group I have been working with for many years now. I’ve been so glad of their commitment to my piece Ceasing over the years and am delighted that they will now release it on an album alongside other exciting new recordings.

​I’ll be performing electronic music in London again in the summer, but at the moment I’m hunkering down to write some scores. I owe a friend a violin piece, which I hope to be the last element of a debut solo album.

​I recently delivered a lecture to the Masters composition students at Durham, which was a good moment for me to try to nail down the ideas behind a journal article I’ve had brewing for a while.

The key, it turned out, was Anna Kornbluh’s new book, Immediacy, Or, The Style Of Too-Late Capitalism. It’s been making waves for good reason: it draws a line through a cloud of connected aesthetics, suddenly revealing the latent shape.

For me, her work clarifies my thoughts about referentiality, tonality, and microtonality in recent music. What makes music that is almost collage-like in its blurry accumulation of references feel so intimate? How do the distortions of microtonality serve this aesthetic? Behind these aesthetic choices, I think, is the lurking hulk of The Internet, whose constant promise of mediation frames all contemporary culture. At some point, this essay will get written: I’m putting it here as a kind of promise to myself to see this one through.

Last month
Last month saw the end of my time at the British School at Rome. I alighted on a suitable topic to write on: how microtonal composers conceive of three-dimensional space. Very often, the inclusion of unconventionally tuned notes inspires the use of a metaphor of depth. But this spatialisation is contrary to our usual understanding of pitch space, in which notes ‘ascend’ from low to high. I’ll be writing about what is going on with this confusing metaphor, focusing on Giacinto Scelsi’s music.

Coming up
I’m busying myself working towards my performance at the Wigmore Hall next month. Please do join me: 1pm, 22nd February.
​
I am also starting to organise concerts with my friends to present some new music for the Hyasynth alongside cool things that they have done. I’ll say more soon.

First, let me apologise for the late email: there are only 18 days left of the month to fill you in on. And that’s all very well because this is a month of composing and improvising rather than one of gigs and releases.

​I’ll spend the month continuing my work at the Casa Scelsi, thanks to the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi. I’m trying a new approach to symmetry. Scelsi sometimes recorded improvisations, then reversed them, and recorded on top. I am experimenting with this approach live, creating an improvised, layered palindrome.

Last month was an intense period of composition and exploration. I finished writing my piece for EXAUDI, based on a passage from Rabelais’s The Fourth Book Of Pantagruel in which Pantagruel and his companions come across frozen words that fall as hail and then melt, releasing their sounds. This seemed like a beautiful subject for a piece for voice and electronics. I’ve recorded melting ice and used that as the basis for a series of vocal effects that freeze and warp the voices of the performers.
​
EXAUDI will perform the piece, Paroles Gelées, at the Wigmore Hall on February 22nd 2025. Tickets are available here.

​Of course, I have also spent the month exploring Rome: museums, galleries, concerts, restaurants, and so, so many churches. The experience is still percolating through me, but I have started to write a piano duet inspired by the hands of statues.

I have two gigs next month, both of my new improvised set. I will play at the British School at Rome’s open studios on December 4th and 5th and in Foggia, Puglia, as part of REF Resilience Festival 2024 – date TBD, between December 6thand 15th.
​
Neither has details online yet, but I will post them on my website and social media when available!
​

​I have been returning again and again to debates around Weber’s idea of disenchantment: how the secularisation of the world has led to a fundamental change in the way we think about magic and rationality. Perhaps Western microtonality is one of the many Twentieth-Century attempts at re-enchantment. Harry Partch, for example, uses historical narrative, appeals to nature and mathematics, and beautiful charts and diagrams, to cast an aura of authority and even transcendence around his ideas. I’m not sure where I’m going with this idea, but the idea of a ‘re-enchantment of pitch’ seems like a fruitful place to start digging. On my reading list: Marcuse, Berger, Milbank, Latour, Taylor, Storm.

Of particular importance to Scelsi was the connection of composition and instinct. That’s what I hope to learn from him: to improvise more spontaneously, leaving behind desire for precise harmonic control. The result will be a new improvised set that I hope to start gigging here in Italy, and bring home to the UK in January.

I am also working on a new piece for vocals and electronics, for premiere in February. 
​
Last month
On September 21st, I premiered a Hyasynth set. It was so fun; thank you to everyone who came – especially to those of you who have signed up to this mailing list!

This one was more planned out: I mapped out the chords and traced a more-or-less spontaneous path between them on each performance. The sound is dense and overdriven, but also, I hope, has a lot of glint and glimmer in it. You can hear it here:

But there’s also part of me that frets about the connection of spolia to a particular kind of European upper-class aesthetic: an obsession with preservation, an aesthetised opposition to waste, and a suspicion of novelty for its own sake. I can’t deny my own grounding in this aesthetic—I love the dusty elegance of these cobbled-together historicisms—but I am uneasy with their nostalgias.

​Coming up
I have a very exciting gig on September 21st. I’ll be debuting my Hyasynth solo set at Colourscape, a music festival on Clapham Common inside an inflatable art venue. I’ve been going to Colourscape since childhood, so this concert is particularly meaningful for me.

​​My piece will explore the shifting sonic colours that arise from the combination of tones on the instrument. I’ll post more about it in the build-up to the festival, so do follow me on Instagram to see more of that.
The concert will happen multiple times between 11am and 4pm. Tickets are £12 for adults and £6 for children.

Ideas
This is a new section! From time to time, I’ll share some of the ideas I’m chewing through.
​
I’ve also taken some time to think about marble. I’m caught by the way that the subtle patterns in marble flow over its surface and how architects manipulate these through techniques like book matching. This led me to experiment with traditional paper marbling with my partner and my friend Eva. I remain fascinated by the combinations of chaos and pattern, control and abandon, organic and chemical in these materials, and I will explore these ideas in my music.

​This month
This is a month of exciting recordings. Next week, I’m in the studio, recording an orchestral piece for an upcoming CD! I’ll be able to reveal more soon.

​Since that will be a while coming out, I will release a single at the beginning of next month. It is called Switchback, and it’s a total one-off: a hard-driving electronic piece that was part of an EP before I got sidetracked by building the Hyasynth.

I’ll be giving away Bandcamp codes in next month’s mailout. The track will be free for you – or anyone else who signs up this month.

I’ve made short videos explaining my PhD on my Instagram. I will soon consolidate them into two videos – one long, one short – that sum everything up. I’ll put those on my YouTube channel later this month, subscribe there to catch them.

Last month
I had great fun at my viva, which I passed, officially bringing my PhD to an end. James Weeks, my external examiner, was a wonderful interlocutor who asked all kinds of interesting questions I will be thinking about for some time to come: why do I like counterpoint so much? What links my work together, stylistically?

​Speaking at the York Festival of Ideas with the Micklegate Singers was an absolute pleasure. We’ll be releasing the recording of their superb performance soon!

Coming up
I’ve busied myself playing my custom synthesiser, the Hyasynth, over the last month, culminating in a first demo performance at my house last Sunday! I played synth, my friends played a string quartet, and we ate pasta. I’ll release more Hyasynth material into the world over the next few months. Last Sunday’s set is this Autumn’s gig.

​This marks the publication of three pieces commissioned by the Micklegate Singers that set the same text by William Penn. This Quaker funerary text is a moving rumination on friendship and eternity that chimes wonderfully with thoughts I explored in an earlier work of mine, Ceasing.
​
I’ll be appearing alongside fellow composers David McGregor and Frederick Viner to discuss the creative process and the works we’ve produced.

Rebecca Burden of terra invisus performs in Clapham

​Last month
terra invisus’s tour of their debut album, Visions, kicked off in Clapham at the beginning of the month, moving on to performances in Devon and Norwich. I’ve been so delighted to see them perform my piece Wound Honey with such flair and commitment. You can hear it on the album linked above.
​
I took the newest version of my synthesiser, the Hyasynth, to Lisbon for the Noise Floor conference. I met wonderful electronic musicians who were kind about the synth – very encouraging, given how new I am to instrument building. I’m looking forward to doing more performing on it in the coming months and releasing lots of improvising and practice videos on my Instagram.

The latest version of the Hyasynth

​Coming up
I have exciting things I can’t yet announce, including synth performances in the autumn and recording sessions in the summer. Stay subscribed here, or on my Instagram, to hear more…