Performances, collaboration, workshops

Happy 2020!

The year has kicked off with a hive of activity for me as I have launched into two weeks of workshops with Gondwana Choirs, soprano Jane Sheldon and conductor Christie Anderson. We have been working on new music I have written for the singers, music which will eventually become a vocal concerto for Jane and the choir. The way we have been working has been to introduce new ideas around vocal technique to the young and highly professional singers and in turn getting them to experiment with these sounds and create their own compositional responses to both my music and the ideas in the piece. These ideas are all centered around space, astronomy and the future. We have come a long way in the first week already and have whittled the amount of music we will present publicly to about 10mins. This new music of mine will premiere in just 4 days as part of the Gondwana Festival of Summer Voices, 7:45pm on the 17th of January.

Once the workshops have finished and the performance is done, the work will be reviewed and the next stages of turning it into a much larger, 3 movement work will get underway. In the meantime I will be going along to some performances and development of other works of mine.

First will be off to Spain, Sevilla, where after two fantastic performances of my oboe concerto Neon Highway in the UK and Australia, it is now time for the Spanish premiere. The performance will be given by soloist Sarah Roper (soloist in the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla), conductor Timothy Phillips and new music ensemble Taller Sonoro. This will all take place within Sevilla's January new music festival, where I will also be speaking about my work. I don’t really speak any Spanish so I am hoping that it will all be in English and that wild hand gestures will suffice as my fall back plan. Time to sharpen up my Spanish:
22nd January 2020, Open Conversation - Sevilla
24th January 2020, Neon Highway - Sevilla

After all of that I will get a bit of time at my desk where I am at the early phases of a very large work for symphony orchestra, choir and soloist. This work will take me the next 6 months to compose, working everyday, and whilst on the road I take a small portable keyboard with me which I can plug into my laptop to aid composing on the go.

For a good chunk of 2019 I was composing my third work for collaboration with aerialist Ilona Jantti. We are now entering the final phases of developing this work, our biggest and most ambitious work to date. We will be working for 3 weeks in Helsinki in Feb/March and during this time we will be melding the music I have composed together with the choreography. This process is one that Ilona and I have done on two previous works together and it will see us both editing music and choreography together as the piece becomes a new thing, more than the sum of it’s individual musical and physical parts. There is a chance to catch a sneak preview of this work at the end of the development on the 5th March 2020, Helsinki. Ilona and I will be joined by musicians from Helsinki's premiere new music ensemble Uusinta and a number of additional circus performers.