NMC Record Release

Today marks the first time I’ve had a piece released by a real record label! Now Is A Long Time has been beautifully recorded by the Fellowship of the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain alongside three gorgeous works by Amy Bryce, Nathan James Dearden and Lisa Robertson. It’s released via a superb label, NMC. You can hear it on Spotify or, for those of you that are good enough to pay for music, download it from their online store.
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NMC has also put out a nice series of video interviews with the four of us, which give a flavour of the work:

My piece, Now Is A Long Time, is about how strangely time passes when you’ve got nothing to do. It’s not entirely a lockdown piece; it’s more about the time I spent lying in bed hopped up on opiates following a car accident in 2019. 

I was interested in the philosophy of time. If we paused the world – stopped birds in the air, stilled the humming of atoms – could we say that time passes during the freeze? This question is addressed in a fascinating 1969 paper by Sydney Shoemaker. He imagines three strange cities, where time is paused for a year every three, four and five years, respectively. Every sixtieth year, the whole world freezes. Shoemaker aims to present a scenario in which the passage of frozen time might be reasonably inferred. But its uncanny resemblance to 2020’s drifting lockdowns hit me harder than its philosophical implications.

I found this a challenging piece to write, perhaps because it was an abstract but emotive topic. It also marked a different approach to harmony than I usually take. My writing usually uses microtones – the notes in between the notes on the keyboard of the piano. These are hard to sing, so I needed to be restrained in their use for this piece. (In a future post I may go deeper into the solutions I found for this piece.)
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The recording of this piece was a delight. Having not heard my music live for months, or seen the NYCGB gang in person, to suddenly turn up and dive into a rehearsal was a delirious pleasure. I was astonished at how quickly the piece came together. We had some of your standard ‘this cable isn’t working’ problems to start with, so I was worried we wouldn’t get through a polished performance. But the Fellowship singers are just superb and were really well prepared. So thank you, Laurence, David, Ellie, Milette, Botch, Freddie, Ella and Loren!